How email works: why a fake email from your boss can reach your inbox
Email spoofing: why an email can say it comes from someone who never sent it
An email can show your boss's real address and still come from a stranger. Here is why email lets anyone write any sender, and what that costs.
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You keep the accounts of a small furniture workshop, and Miva, who runs it, is your boss. On Friday at four, this email from her lands on your phone.
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You are about to pay when Miva walks in from the workshop. She never wrote that email. Yet the address on it is hers, letter for letter.
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Rono wrote it, a few streets away. The sender's address is just one line at the top of the email, the From line, and he typed Miva's address there the way you type a subject.
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A paper letter works the same way. Anyone can sign a letter with any name, and the post still carries it.
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Your phone shows the From line exactly as it was written. Faking it is called email spoofing, and it is as old as email: the rules for sending email, written in 1982, never ask who is writing.
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And it works. In 2024, people told the FBI they lost about $2.8 billion to emails that pretend to come from a boss or a supplier.
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Between Rono's laptop and your phone, the email passed through other computers. To see where one of them could have stopped it, follow the email from the start.
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Go further
Two names behind the story.