Friday, June 17, 2005

Spoof emails

I get spoof emails purporting to be from PayPal sometimes. How do I know, easy. Look at the links in the email (hold your mouse over them) and see if they point to www.paypal.com. if they dont like this one www.notpaypal.com which points to this site.

Today however I got a different sort of spoof email.
Here it is.

Tim:

Sorry this isn’t business related but I was curious if your business had t-shirts, i.e. ones that saw Jethro Consulting with the phrase “Jethro is Excellence” on them. Thanks for whatever information you can provide.

_name removed for privacy_

The email address was ____@uga.edu.
Well the first thing I did was check out the uga.edu site to find that it is the University of Georgia site. So next I did a search on the name ____ to find that while there are a bunch of ____ and ____ that there is no email address listed exactly ____@uga.edu. This doesn't mean that it doesn't exist but its getting pretty likely.

Do you know how to prove an email address is false - wihout actually replying to it?
Maybe it is not a spoof. I might just have to reply.