Did you know that any email address can be spoofed, impersonated, forged – so that it appears to have been from you?

Yes, spammers can, if they wish, impersonate your email address and send spam that appears to be from you.  This is forgery, and it is illegal.  Only by analyzing the email headers can one determine that the email was impersonated, or spoofed.     But even the headers can contain falsified information, so this is not always a help.  And if they were able to hijack your email server, it may not be possible to identify the source.

We are not going to go into the technical reasons for this at this time, but suffice it to say that the email system is basically broken, and no Internet-wide fix is in sight.  Not that fixes aren’t being considered.  It just doesn’t look like any will be implemented in the near future.

You may want to employ authentication technology such as digital signatures, to authenticate your email.

This can be used to prove the email was from you, but still does not prevent spoofing.

For more information:

http://www.cert.org/tech_tips/email_spoofing.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spoofing

Also, see our previous post about fighting email spam.

You can help end spam by submitting it to:

 http://www.knujon.com/index.html.

Knujon.com has already succeeded in shutting down over 50,000 junk mail sites.

They analyze spam and work to shut down the spammers at the source.  There are more details at the web site, but basically all you have to do is to forward any spam you receive to the following email address:

nonregistered@coldrain.net

One easy way is to select a bunch of the spam emails and forward them all as attachments.  The also web site describes a number of other ways to send spam to them.

Not a bad idea.  He used his stimulus check to defend freedom.   He explains why in the video found at the following link.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/5q66wd

The bad news is that, Yes, AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition must be upgraded to version 8 by May 29, 2008.

The good news is that AVG Free is still free.  Now that may seem redundant, but lots of folks thought AVG Free was going away when they had to upgrade to version 7.0.  In fact, ever one of my customers who were using AVG free at that time, thought they had to pay for the new version.  Not true then, and not true now.

AVG Free Version is still alive and well.  Just download AVG Free, version 8 before May 29 and install it.  There is no need to uninstall version 7.5 before installing version 8.   The installation routine will find your old version and uninstall it automatically.

The following link will take you to the download page:  http://free.grisoft.com/ww.download?prd=afe