Learn how to send your own fake email

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 [email protected] to [email protected].

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 deadfake.com
	Go to Applications, Utilities, and choose Terminal. In the window that comes up, type nslookup -q=MX deadfake.com
	Bring up your favourite shell, and type nslookup -q=MX deadfake.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".

deadfake.com        MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.deadfake.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.deadfake.com 25
            

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

Continue to Part 2 »