Create Your Own Fake E-mail

Posted by Sayantan March 31, 2009 1:54 AM

So, you want to learn how to send your own fake mail? It's extraordinarily easy to do, and requires no extra software installed on your PC at all. It can be done with Windows, Macintosh, Linux - any modern PC that has an internet connection will do it.


There are a just a few simple steps. First, you'll need to decide on the FROM and the TO email addresses. If the FROM address that you're choosing isn't a real one, make sure that the domain name (the bit after the @ sign) is a real one. If it's not a real one, it almost certainly won't work.






For the purpose of this tutorial, we'll be sending from bush@whitehouse.gov to dummy@anysite.com.


Second, you'll need to find out the mail server that your recipient is using.

















Click Start, Run, enter "CMD", then presss OK. In the window that comes up, type nslookup -q=MX anysite.com
Go to Applications, Utilities, and choose Terminal. In the window that comes up, type nslookup -q=MX anysite.com
Bring up your favourite shell, and type nslookup -q=MX anysite.com

There will be a lot of information on the screen - all you need to look for is a line that talks about a mail exchanger. If there are several, pick the one with the lowest "preference number". 


anysite.com        MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.anysite.com

Now, you'll need to connect to this mail exchanger using telnet. This is the same for any PC, but Vista users may not have it installed by default - see this note about getting telnet on Vista before you continue. When you're ready, type: 


telnet mail.anysite.com 25

Press enter, and after a short pause, you should see a welcome message from the server.


Ok, so now you're connected. You need to enter the following information - press ENTER at each new line. You won't be able to press backspace to delete a mistake, so you'll need to type everything correctly first time!


HELO whitehouse.gov

This tells the mail server that we are "whitehouse.gov".
MAIL FROM: bush@whitehouse.gov

This tells the server who is sending the mail.
RCPT TO: dummy@anysite.com

This tells the server who to deliver the mail to. At this point, if the recipient doesn't exist, you may see a warning message (but not always).
DATA

This tells the server that we're ready to start writing our message. It should acknowledge, telling you to end your message with a full stop (period) on a single line. All we need to do now, is write our message and don't forget that full stop at the end. 

Hello dummy@anysite, I managed to send a fake mail all by myself!
.

Dont forget that last dot. When you've done that, and pressed enter, simply enter QUIT and your mail should be delivered.


There's a little bit more to it, of course. You'll need to enter proper "headers" if you want the mail to look more believable. After doing the DATA command, I'd recommend pasting in the following "headers" to make sure it looks realistic when viewed in Outlook, Hotmail, etc.


Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:49:13 +0100 (BST)
From: George W Bush bush@whitehouse.gov
To: Poor Sod dummy@anysite.com
Subject: Fake mail

Hello dummy@anysite, I managed to send a fake mail all by myself!
.
dummy@anysite.combush@whitehouse.gov

And that's all there is to it.

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