How to detect whether an email is genuine, in 5 seconds or less
I'm writing this entry on how to detect spam emails because I get thousands of spam emails a week, and many of them are of the "Fraudulent activity" notices from what appear to be banks, hoping that you'll log into their fake sites so they can steal your password.
However, I got a real fraud notice from Bank of America today (it was taken care of, no problem), and I so I had to use a quick 5-second manual check to figure out whether the email was real or not.
The the message header is the key to this. The header shows where the message originated, and can tell you whether the message is real or not.
For example, here are the first 2 header lines from the real Bank of America:
And here are the first two from a fake Ebay message:
(Actually, finding an obvious fake message is tough for me because I have several layers of spam filtering in place, so by the time it gets to my inbox, it's already defeated those layers, and even then most spam messages that sneak through get thrown directly into the Spam box by Spambayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) )
To view the message headers:
On Outlook, right click on the message, and choose "Message Options" all the way at the bottom. Then see if the second line, which is the originating server, is consistent with who the message is supposed to be from.
In Gmail, you can see the headers by clicking on the down arrow at the right of the message, and choosing the "Show original" option.
For other mailers, search on the help for "message headers".
Even if you get a notice from a bank, you may still want to manually type in the bank's web site address rather than clicking on the link, just to be safe.
I hope this was helpful to you.
