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The display of sender emails on various email clients and services. It is discouraging to see how blindly clients trust the name provided by a message's sender
by domador 4y ago
The display of sender emails on various email clients and services. It is discouraging to see how blindly clients trust the name provided by a message's sender and display it as-is (and without the actual email address) to the user. The client will naively display
"Amazon Customer Service"
as a message's sender when the full name and email that come in the message are something like
"Amazon Customer Service" <contact@amazonfakedomain.com>
So many technically-sophisticated verification processes are currently run on incoming email to throw out spam and scam messages, yet this particular, rather clumsy form of attack remains unaddressed. Email clients will warn you about everything else but this! I can think of a few simple ways in which clients could detect suspicious sender emails and/or names and help users know that there's something seemingly fishy about a particular sender. Yet I'm surprised that so little attention is paid to this attack vector.