Email Spoofing
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.
