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Ask HN: Why are most web services "spoofing" the From email header?

2 points by boronine 2 years ago · 2 comments · 1 min read

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All examples below are "From" headers in emails sent from various web services to our corporate email. This makes it look like we are sending emails to ourselves.

Some examples:

    "'Amazon Web Services' via Redacted - Admin" <admin@redacted.com>
    'Mezmo, Inc.' via Redacted Inc. - Admin <admin@redacted.com>
    'service@intl.paypal.com' via Redacted - Admin <admin@redacted.com>
    noreply-spamdigest via Redacted - Support <support@redacted.com>
    'Shopify Partners' via Redacted Inc. - Admin <admin@redacted.com>
Some notable exceptions:

    Heroku Billing Team <team.notifications@herokumanager.com>
    Wise <info@wise.com>
Questions:

1. What could be the justification for this practice?

2. Does this practice have a name?

3. Is this not considered spoofing?

4. Reading plainly, "X via Y" implies that Y is facilitating something on behalf of X, is this the intended reading?

sacrosanct 2 years ago

If the shop is doing DMARC[0] & DKIM[1] this is a non-issue

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMARC

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DomainKeys_Identified_Mail

  • boronineOP 2 years ago

    That DMARC link talks about "From: rewriting" with a similar example using "via". I suppose this addresses the "spoofing" part of my question, thanks! I would still like to know more about this practice in transactional emails.

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