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Verifying if an email has been spoofed

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Carol Haynes:
I personally don't use it much - I do have 5 GoogleMail accounts that I occasionally check with IMAP in Outlook and it seems to work fine for me? What am I missing?

Curt:
I have no understanding of the technical side of this problem, but it seems to me that all this spoofy thingy is possible because we don't care to use Digital Signature (DS)? I tried to use it for private mailing when it was installed on my first computer (that is, the first with Internet access), but almost no-one had their email client set up to handle it. In Denmark we have another version of DS than the ones we all are offered via Microsoft, and we use it for addressing the authorities (we can do all of our taxes via the Internet only), and may use it privately. But no-one cares to use it for normal emailing because there are always someone who cannot open you mail because they have not installed this DS or they don't understand how to use it. And that may cause allow the actual problem.

Or am I completely mistaken?

mediaguycouk:
I think the bigger problem is that the servers don't trust each other (or fail to distrust bad servers). Once servers know which other servers are legitimate then trusting the home user should be easy.

For example, if yahoo trusted hotmail and ignored any email from hotmail.com that wasn't from the hotmail server you could presume it was spoofed and spam. Hotmail would then do some protection to ensure that you are who you say you are. Comcast could do the same, but ensure that the user was on their network or authenticated somehow.

Making the end user responsible won't work imho, because the recipient has no way of knowing that the email they are being sent should be signed.

Curt:
... the recipient has no way of knowing that the email they are being sent should be signed.-mediaguycouk (May 09, 2008, 06:34 AM)
--- End quote ---

- very good point.


This will be something Bad Big Brother may want to force upon all.

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