So how exactly do spam emails even work? I've seen garbage sent from actually legit sender addresses (not emails that looked legit using cyrillic symbols), emails from myself to myself, and random addresses to random addresses where I wasn't even CC or BBC'ed on. Only Gmail's spam filters seem to work decently, but even other major hosts like Outlook shit the bed when dealing with spam/junk emails.
Email headers are neither encrypted nor validated. In fact email is actually less secure than modern phone networks. Literally the only thing holding it together is the fact that only about 7 entities in the world operate meaningfully large servers and cooperate with blacklists and heuristics. But as you've seen it's been getting less reliable recently.
>>108649827Then why do scammers still use cyrillic symbols to fake addresses, or "rn" to look like "m"? If it was that easy to fake headers then couldn't any email look like it came from support@google.com or ranjeet@microsoft.com?
>>108650528>If it was that easy to fake headers then couldn't any email look like it came fromthey can? you never heard of spoofing?
>>108650528credibility with the ability to reply. if the goal is to click a link they can just use any spoofed address, but even then they may want a more legit looking domain than some long ass AWS one.
>>108651804I don't think the ability to reply is a factor here. You can simply set the reply-to field to whatever you want for that.
>>108649827just use pgp
>>108650528To circumvent the spam filter.The gmail spam filter knows that server(s) "support@google.com" is supposed to come from so if some rando in India is using "support@google.com" it's an obvious scam.Setting the "from" field really is as easy as setting the "to", "cc" and "bcc" fields.And this has its use cases because companies often want to put "noreply@..." or "info@..." instead of the employee who happened to send the mail.And the server companies use to send emails from is often not the same server they use to receive emails on, they might not even be in the same country.
>>108649827>Email headers are neither encrypted nor validated.The server IP address of the sender can at least be validated by adding an SPF record to the DNS.It's not strictly mandatory but if you don't have a correct SPF record pointing to the IP address of the server you send emails from your emails are far more likely to be marked as spam.It's not much but you can at least prove you own the domain name you use in the "from" field.
