Check the From Email Address!

Check the From Email Address! A reader asks…

I read your article, “No More Cheap 3rd-Party Emailers” but I am a little confused. Where do I find the email address? I use the Mail app on iPhone, mail.google.com, and Outlook. When I’m looking at the list of emails, all I see is a name and the subject line Even when I read the email on my iPhone I don’t see the From address, just the name. Help?

Seeing the actual email address that sent you an email has become a critical test for detecting fake emails. To find the actual email address, the procedure varies slightly by interface:

In the iPhone mail app, open the email, tap the From: name, then tap it again to reveal the actual email address. It’s the same for Outlook on iPhone. Unfortunately, it gets harder with other email apps on the iPhone. Such as the Gmail app on iPhone, where you have to start a reply before you can see the email address. Same for the Yahoo and AOL Mail apps on iPhone. On these apps, you sometimes even have to tap the From name in the draft reply several times to see the email address.

In the Gmail (on the web) interface and in Outlook (Classic), you have to open the email; the address is shown next to the name. At least this is a little easier. My hope is that all email interfaces recognize that scam and fake emails commonly spoof the Name field and adjust their fields so that the inbox list doesn’t just show the From name, but also (or better yet, instead) the actual email address. That will go a long way to help us recognize fake emails.

My advice for everyone is to mark any non-personal email as spam, junk, or phishing if the email address (domain name after the @ sign) doesn’t match the company’s official name (e.g., chase.com for Chase Bank). The same goes for any personal email from someone you don’t know. Many email service providers use crowdsourcing to identify junk email, and your marking it as such helps us all.

As to why this is important, the incidence of scammers spoofing emails from legitimate businesses has been increasing exponentially, and the From email address is the easiest and fastest way to verify an email’s legitimacy. If you missed it, I still think my article is worth a read: No More Cheap 3rd-Party Emailers. Too many people are not looking more deeply and are responding to these fake emails, which keeps the scammers in business.

These days, most unsolicited emails circulating online are fake, and checking the sender’s actual email address (not just the name) is currently the easiest and quickest way to spot them. None of us wants to waste more time than we have to on junk email, right?