Revealing Fraud In Email Addresses

I was cleaning out the fish bowl today since we are expecting company over the Thanksgiving holiday. My "fish bowl" is a hand designed glazed piece designed by my ceramics instructor at Kansas State University. I dump all my change, notes, and Forest Service badges in it each evening.

I had a newspaper clipping titled Revealing Fraud In Email Addresses. The article discussed an email message's full header. The header "shows the path that message took across the Internet from the sender to recipient." A detailed explanation of how to read email headers is at http://www.spamlinks.net/track-trace-headers.htm. I read additional information on this site. I assumed this would be a fairly simplistic process to determine the source of the email. I learned, however, with spam their are numerous forgeries embedded in the addresses. It is much more complicated than I anticipated. The consumer safety site OnGuardOnline.gov suggests forwarding it to the bank or institution used in the forged address and to spam@uce.gov. We received a sample of a forged address at work last week. The email asked for personal information and looked exactly like a message from Bank of America.