
Email spoofing
Creating email spam or phishing messages with a forged sender identity or address / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address.[1] The term applies to email purporting to be from an address which is not actually the sender's; mail sent in reply to that address may bounce or be delivered to an unrelated party whose identity has been faked. Disposable email address or "masked" email is a different topic, providing a masked email address that is not the user's normal address, which is not disclosed (for example, so that it cannot be harvested), but forwards mail sent to it to the user's real address.[2]
The original transmission protocols used for email do not have built-in authentication methods: this deficiency allows spam and phishing emails to use spoofing in order to mislead the recipient. More recent countermeasures have made such spoofing from internet sources more difficult but not eliminated it; few internal networks have defenses against a spoof email from a colleague's compromised computer on that network. Individuals and businesses deceived by spoof emails may suffer significant financial losses; in particular, spoofed emails are often used to infect computers with ransomware.