Email spoofing is the method by which the sender of the email modifies or alters the header information of the email such that the “From” address contains a different email address than from which it was sent.

Email spoofing is fairly easy to carry out and it is one of the most over-utilized form of spoofing. It has a very limited scope of being used for legitimate reasons. Most of the time email spoofing qualifies as spamming activity and is often used for email scams like lottery winnings, antivirus scams, etc.

Email spoofing is normally carried out by spammers through the use of robot programs that automate the process of sending thousands of spoofed emails in a very small period of time.

Email spoofing has been used in a lot of scams across the internet world. They have been known to target a specific country or a company or a group of people using the same website. Having been fooled by the authenticity of the sender’s email address, the users are often scammed into downloading some form of a malware.

The most used form of email spoofing is phishing wherein the email sender forces the user to believe that the email that was sent was from an authentic source and the information that is requested in the email is valid for a specific reason. Phishing is normally used to steal personal information and often financial information like credit card numbers, bank account number, credit card pins, bank account pins, date of birth, addresses, etc.

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