Welcome back, Donna. I did the best I could, which was to persuade HRH to play Strauss every hour during her show on Monday (check the music log if you don't believe me). Sorry I wondered aloud if you were pulling legs, but I did wonder. It seemed rather unlike you. You're usually apparently so unflappable.
It is relatively easy to spoof another person's e-mail address. I have a vbscript file on my desktop that's only about ten lines which can be used for that (handy for sending e-mail to your brother ostensibly from his girlfriend) or a whole host of other things, like mail flooding annoying spammers. The problem is, SMTP servers append the originating IP address of an e-mail to its headers. If you just view the entire header of an e-mail, you will be able to see the IP address from which the mail actually originated. If you have a bunch of different e-mails all coming from the same IP but with different From addresses, you know that someone is pulling a spoofing stunt. Another handy thing about this is that you can determine what network someone is on, and often, consequently, where they work, from the IP in the header. The only way I know of to get around this behavior of SMTP servers is to hack up your own SMTP server that behaves differently. This exploit is known as "masquerading", by the way.
The obvious other way that mail can come from someone's address without their knowledge is in the event that their logon credentials fall into other hands, or if a worm / virus is used to deploy the message. In those cases, the originating IP address is that of the mail account owner's machine. This is simply an issue of security.
Angie, that
did need an apology. Thank you. Bob Catsicle accepts your apology, too. He doesn't want to be the subject of Eugenics.
