Analyzing Internet e-mail date-spoofing

Spammers and phishers constantly keep on changing spam structure to circumvent anti-spam procedures and target maximum recipients. Of late, it has been observed that spammers spoof date header of their spam e-mails to keep them on top in the recipient’s mailbox with an aim to maximize the chances of immediate attention of recipients. This form of spoofing can cause confusion to recipients, create problems in time bound transactions, increase chances of opening spam, worsen the problem of false positive, result in loss of work productivity, render date header field insignificant and would spawn a host of legal issues. This paper reports date-spoofing, analyzes implications of date-spoofed e-mails on some commercial and corporate e-mail servers and surveys e-mail user behavior. It further discusses detection of date-spoofed e-mails to enable forensic examinations of date forged e-mails and presents possible technical solutions to stop date-spoofing.