Faking your email address?

[Nate J]

I've seen in a few places now, email addresses being shown that don't exist, or the domains don't exist, ie: me.com, the name of the hotel and travel company are fictitious and the domain in the email does not work.

So, I was wondering how this is possible? If it is commercially anyway, as I'd like to use it for one of the training courses at work, instead of having to set up all the different email accounts.

[Chris]

What about using @example.com ?

http://www.example.com

[Sput]

me.com is owned by apple for hosted services.

[Nate J]

No, I meant the demonstrations of it in the Apple Stores, there's an email that comes from lochart-travel.com, and another from something like grand-tribecahotel.com.

I've been looking round and I think it's called masquerading, it's just that none of the results seem to help...

[Nini]

Ah, you mean as in faking where an email came from. Hmm, should be easy but what nefarious deeds are you requiring a false address for?

[Nick Harvey]

(Sorry, but just couldn't resist this.)

It had to be a woman to make the first post admitting knowing how to fake it!

[Gavin Scott]

I wouldn't go as far as suggesting Nate is up to no good - but its difficult to work out what advantage "masquerading" would give to a legitimate training exercise that a bunch of gmail accounts set up for such a purspose wouldn't provide.

EDIT: Other than the relatively small set-up time for a gmail account.

[Dr Lobster*]

you can change the outgoing email address in outlook (or whatever email client you are using) to anything you like.




bare in mind though that if you *are* using this method for nefarious purposes, the server generated email headers are enough to identify you, it's ok as a prank on your friends or to use a domain you've purchased as your outgoing address, but anything else you might want to consider something more secure and anonymous

[Nini]

It had to be a woman to make the first post admitting knowing how to fake it!

Oh, phnar indeed Nick you big ol' tease. I, like Gav, reckon Nate isn't going to do anything bad with the spoofed email address but you have to wonder why you'd have to at all.

Our kid Lobster was thinking what I was thinking, should be piss in a cup.

[Nate J]

Haha - cheers for the help all, no, nothing illegal going on with me, you won't be getting any blue pills being sold to you by me, it's for an IT training course at work, one of the courses is email in Outlook etc, I just thought it might add a bit of realism to it.

Cheers to all again.