Knowledgebase: SmarterMail
Email Spoofing

If you receive bounce messages for mail that appears to originate from your domain, or you receive a reply to a message you never sent, you may be the victim of a 'spoofing' attack. Spoofing means faking the return address on outgoing mail to hide the true origin of the message.

"When you send a letter through the post, you generally write a return address on the envelope so the recipient can identify the sender, and so the post office can return the mail to the sender in the event of a problem. But nothing prevents you from writing a different return address than your own; in fact, someone else could send a letter and put your return address on the envelope. Email works the same way. When a server sends an email message, it specifies the sender, but this sender field can be forged. If there is a problem with delivery and someone forged your address on the message, then the message will be returned to you, even if you weren't the actual sender."

If you've received a reply to a message that wasn't sent from your address, there are two possibilities:

  1. The message was spoofed, forging your address as the sender.
  2. The original sender used your address as a reply-to address so that responses would be sent to you.

Neither of these possibilities indicates that your account was compromised.

If you don’t believe that the email is truthful, or that the sender is legitimate, then simply don’t click on the link and type your email address. If there is a file attachment, simply don’t open it, lest it contain a virus payload.

Always send us the full email headers so that we can assist you to verify on the email.

Steps to view the headers for an email message in Smartermail:-

Steps to view the headers for an email message in email clients:-