In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don't have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It's basically like putting a name tag on that says "Joe Biden" and everyone believing you're the president.

I didn't do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don't remember what I did but I'm pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn't want to end up getting expelled for """hacking""" so I didn't do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn't have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.

It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don't remember.

[–] HeavyRust@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.

I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.