How can my email address be used in the FROM field when I did NOT send it?
 E-mail spoofing is used to describe
fraudulent email activity in which the sender email address and other parts of the email headers are altered to appear as though the email
was sent from a different source.
E-mail spoofing is a technique commonly used for spamming e-mail and phishing
(more serious than spamming alone) to hide the origin of an e-mail message. By changing certain properties
or headers of the e-mail, such as the From, Return-Path and Reply-To fields (which can be found in the message header),
malicious users can make the e-mail appear to be from someone other than the actual sender.
Email Spoofing is sometimes associated with website spoofing which is a
mimic of an actual, well-known website but are run by malicious parties either with fraudulent intentions or as a means of criticism of the
organization or companies activities.
The result is that, although the e-mail appears to come from the email indicated in the "From" field (found in the email headers) it actually comes from another e-mail address, probably the same one indicated in the "Reply To" field; if the initial e-mail is replied to, the delivery will be sent to the "Reply To" e-mail, that is, to the spammer's email.
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In many cases, you can determine the origin of the email by reviewing the
email headers. Many e-mail clients don’t show these by default. In
Outlook or Outlook Express, open the message and then click View |
Options to see the headers, as shown in Figure 3. You can also
see these by right-clicking on the email before opening and viewing
properties. This method is usually safer.
In this example, you can see the screen shot and the location that the
actual SMTP server may be seen.
Unfortunately, even the email headers don’t always tell you the truth about where the
email message came from. Spammers and other email spoofers often use open relays to send their bogus or malicious messages.
An open relay is an SMTP mail server that is not correctly configured and so allows third-parties to send e-mail through it that is not sent from nor to a local user. In that case, the “Received from” field in the header only points you to the SMTP server that was victimized.
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