Email spoofing

[Mark H]

Is anyone familiar with the process whereby a mass spammer chooses the site from which the emails appear to come ie hjkldcg@awellknownsite.com? Is it a vulnerability with the awellknownsite.com's processes, and/or is it simply that the spammer simply picks a name that the receiver is likely to recognise (despite the fact that the name before the @ is often gibberish)?

And, no, I'm not thinking of going into the spamming business.....

[RuralWeb]

It relies on the fact that most people/servers have a catch-all email set-up which means that anything@ will get through.

[Mark H]

Thanks Malcom - forgive me for being dim, but do you mean that awellknownsite.com has a catchall which allows them to receive anything@awelknownsite.com (and the spammer takes advantage of this in order to send emails to others), or that the email addresses that the spammer is sending to have catchalls set up?

[RuralWeb]

Doooh - me not reading your post correctly, I thought you meant how do they get emails into a domain rather than from. I did read about how it was done a couple of weeks ago I will see if i can dig it out.

[RuralWeb]

All is expalined here: http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT...rc=bar_sch_nam

[Mark H]

Thanks Malcolm