Receiving Suspicious Emails from Your Friends

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Have you been receiving emails from your friends but you find the content of the messages suspicious ? I am not to disclose any content of the email messages I received. The content of the message was something like this :

I am currently in the United Kingdom (UK), can you please get me some tuition fee end of this month.

Hey, Mom is in the hospital now, can you please call me coz my phone ran out of credit

Well, some of these messages meant no harm to you, because if one of your family member was really admitted into the hospital, surely you will call the other to verify but what if, those messages can arise some tension situation, like saying you are in danger and need help. Well, all these look genuine because when the receiver received it, it is with your email address and name on the “From” field. The nature of these third-party has sent these messages in such way that not even famous email service provider like Google, MSN and Yahoo! are able to trace and marked them as SPAM mail.

We will see how you can protect yourself from being one of them to disseminate non-genuine information to your friends via email.

1. Never reveal your email address unnecessarily

2. Never search friends on social network with your own email address

(one of the example is Facebook offer a search system whereby they search all email address contacts within your email account for friends who are already connected to the Internet)

Not only Facebook does that, many social network sites have this kind of similar email contact search system. Well, I am pretty sure Facebook keeps the users’ data in a private and confidential manner, but what if they are hacked, I believe they have millions, billions and trillions of contacts that hackers are interested in. Even you might think passwords are all algorithm-encrypted, getting your email address is already sufficient to sabotage you, like the 2 scenarios mentioned above.

3. Check the origin of the email message you received: check IP address / check mail by server

Next, let’s take a look of how is this possibly done. We take a comparison between a genuine email message and a non-genuine one. Usually, these email messages are about funding, advertisement and prizes. Double confirm the details inside before proceed with any further actions. If you are a person IT-background, you will know how to send such email with a valid format until it looks genuine and not traced as SPAM, sorry we are not going to guide you how to do that. We can only tell you, this can be done through a very simple contact form, so please be aware when you are using a contact form like this.

It’s all about the script behind a contact form was coded in such way to make email messages sent in a genuine manner but containing non-genuine information or rather advertising-oriented medium. Why such approach appears in the Internet market ? Because, more people are familiar with email blasting software, but some email blasting software was not designed properly to disseminate information, so to get in touch with the customers, some chose to do it the illegal way.

The chart below will illustrate how an email message is usually sent and how some of them by-pass it.

User sends out email in a proper channel where it goes to the SMTP server then it will be “floating” in the Internet, when recipients open the email message, it goes in to the users’ inbox through POP3 server.

Unethical sser sends out email in a improper channel where it does not require a SMTP server, it will be “floating” in the Internet, when recipients open the email message, it goes in to the users’ inbox through POP3 server. Example, recipients received it from myfriend@hotmail.com, if you check properly, that email was not mailed by hotmail.com server, rather a generic server used for PHP sendmail() function. So this is how you get fake email messages where your friends’ name remain to look genuine at the “From” field.

Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard for electronic mail (e-mail) transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks. SMTP is specified for outgoing mail transport and uses TCP port 25. The protocol for new submissions is effectively the same as SMTP, but it uses port 587 instead. The Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by local e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. POP and IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) are the two most prevalent Internet standard protocols for e-mail retrieval. Virtually all modern e-mail clients and servers support both. The POP protocol has been developed through several versions, with version 3 (POP3) being the current standard. POP3 is used for most webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo!, usually on port 995.