On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 04:12:25PM -0700 I heard the voice of Ron D'Eau Claire, and lo! it spake thus: > > Often the "virus" looks through the e-mail addresses stored on the > machine it has infected and chooses one at random to spoof as the > originator.
Remember (or, well, learn for the first time if you're not a nerd), the From: header in emails means exactly nothing as far as determining where the mail came from. It's purely cosmetic, and trivially settable, as evinced by looking at the From: on this mail (hint: I'm not actually Ron :). So the From: on a scam email doesn't mean anything other than "whatever person or program sent this happened to see that email address somewhere somehow, and decided to use it as the From:". No need for it to ever have been within a thousand miles of any system actually associated with that person. Of course, they often DO come from either local infection of that person's system, or a system of a correspondent of theirs that has the address sitting in their address book just waiting to be harvested, but that's just a way of finding a handy address to claim, not a requirement of any sort for sticking it on the mail. -- Matthew Fuller, N3TZJ <n3...@n3tzj.org> ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
