In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don't have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It's basically like putting a name tag on that says "Joe Biden" and everyone believing you're the president.

I didn't do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don't remember what I did but I'm pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn't want to end up getting expelled for """hacking""" so I didn't do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn't have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.

It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don't remember.

[–] RickRussell_CA@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It's almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.

Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago

I was on the school network, so maybe they accept ones from within and reject ones from outside.

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