E-mail spoofing

Email spoofing is the creation of email messages with a forged sender address.

Because the core email protocols do not have any mechanism for authentication, it is common for spam and phishing emails to use such spoofing to mislead the recipient about the origin of the message.

When an SMTP email is sent, the initial connection provides two pieces of address information:

Together these are sometimes referred to as the "envelope" addressing, by analogy with a traditional paper envelope, and unless the receiving mail server signals that it has problems with either of these items, the sending system sends the "DATA" command, and typically sends several header items, including:

and sometimes:

The result is that the email recipient sees the email as having come from the address in the From: header; they may sometimes be able to find the MAIL FROM address; and if they reply to the email it will go to either the address presented in the From: or Reply-to: header - but none of these addresses are typically reliable, so automated bounce messages may generate backscatter.

Malware such as Klez and Sober and many more modern examples often search for email addresses within the computer they have infected, and use those addresses both as targets for email, but also to create credible forged From fields in the emails that they send, so that these emails are more likely to be opened. For example:

In this case, even if Bob's system detects the incoming mail as containing malware, he sees the source as being Charlie, even though it really came from Alice's computer; meanwhile Alice may remain unaware that her computer has been infected.

It has happened that the media printed false stories based on spoofed e-mails.

In the early Internet, "legitimately spoofed" email was common. For example, a visiting user might use the local organization's server to send email from the user's foreign address. Since most servers were configured as "open relays", this was a common practice. As spam email became an annoying problem, these sorts of "legitimate" uses fell out of favor.

When multiple software systems communicate with each other via email, spoofing may be required in order to facilitate such communication. In any scenario where an email address is set up to automatically forward incoming emails to a system which only accepts emails from the email forwarder, spoofing is required in order to facilitate this behavior. This is common between ticketing systems which communicate with other ticketing systems.

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Wikipedia