[clug] E-mail spam problem

[Francis James Whittle]

I'm tempted to blacklist myself now and see what happens....

On Sun, 2009-07-05 at 23:49 +1000, Brendan Jurd wrote:
> 2009/7/5 peter anderson <peterjohnanderson at gmail.com>:
> > I
> > am baffled at how this is done and was wondering if somebody on this
> > list could explain how the spammers do this.
> 
> There's really nothing to it.  An email message is just a bunch of
> text in a special format [1] fired at a mail server.  You can set the
> "From:" header to whatever you like.  You can set any of the headers
> to whatever you like.
> 
> If I wanted to I could send email to you that is "From" any address,
> whether it has anything to do with me or not.  Spammers obviously
> don't want you to know who they really are, so they falsify this
> header.
> 
> Using the target address as the value for "From" is a neat trick
> because some mail servers will check that the "From" address is valid.
>  And since most people aren't going to blacklist their own address,
> it's got a pretty good chance of getting through.
> 
> Cheers,
> BJ
> 
> [1] http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html