is forged email legal????

I want to send a girl a letter with something like jxrry59luvsu@flowersanddinnertonight?.com. Can I do this without getting into trouble with either legal issues or terms of service???

I doubt it is illegal. However, it can be construed as a spam header if it is indeed forged in some way and may not pass some spam filters (Most spam filters I have seen do not work for ****ing ****). I do not know the laws concerning this, but I would not expect to see the mail police at your door any time soon.

I also doubt you will forge mail headers to send mail bombs, mass mailings to 200,000 people. Now that would be illegal.

Hope this helps.

If only it was illegal... I could sue all those spam arses

I don't think it's illegal per se. You aren't defrauding anyone are you? You're not breaking any terms of use.

And on a side note - How very romantic of you. How will she respond?

If you intend to use 'jxrry59luvsu@flowersanddinnertonight?.com' as your Email address and it is your Email address then no.
If you intend to use 'jxrry59luvsu@flowersanddinnertonight?.com' as your Email address and its not your Email address, then the owner of address 'jxrry59luvsu@flowersanddinnertonight?.com' gets a date with your Babe.
If you need any more advice or wish to know how our date went, Email me at - jxrry59luvsu@flowersanddinnertonight?.com.

Forging email is probably not illegal in most countries.

Deliberately putting the incorrect from address on an email sent through your ISP may be against their email AUP, however.

If the from address is a domain which doesn't exist, or you don't own and don't have an account on, that's obviously against the rules.

Whether anyone cares depends on whether you do it maliciously or not. Spamming is clearly bad, and your ISP will notice and ban you. Sending mal-ware deliberately is bad too.

On the other hand, accidentally sending forged headers is probably ok. Particularly if you did it without any knowledge of doing so.

If you're sending it to a small number of recipients who you know won't report it you're probably ok in practice too.

Not illigal but check your terms of service..your ISP probably wont ahve a problem with it, but it may. It may not work anyway, I have my mail server set to not recive mail with forged headers, if her ISP is he same way it will never get there

I would have to say, even on the onset that it was illegal or you were "breaking the rules" of whoever your ISP is, no one would really care because you are not actually trying to get someone to buy something from you, or any of the "typical" bullshit that we all know comes from any SPAM email. This sounds simply like a romantic/cute thing you are doing, and you aren't hacking anything to get it done, etc. The only thing I would worry about, as said above, is the fact that a SPAM filter might block it. Though were you planning on sending this to an email address, or sending as a reply address for a text message to a phone or pager? If it's going to a phone or pager, I'm not sure how the rules are setup for SPAM, if they even really have filters for SPAM...

If you are to only send one, and you are not trying to impersonate someone (say like the president of the US), I seriously doubt your ISP would ever notice. Depending on what email server you connect to though your mileage may vary (depending on how it is setup). Although you might want to consider sending your real email address in the letter, otherwise, if she replies...uh oh :)

/nebulus

this might be going against the grain of progress, but have you considered doing things the "old-fashioned way"? that way, there's no potential for illegal activity- just the potential for being turned down in person instead of over e-mail.

I am doing this to be "cute" she already likes me. I just don't want cute to be stupid. And for the yo yo who said he would let me know how the date went- do u really think i would post anything that would reveal anything????

From my understanding, forging email is not illegal, because technically, you are not hacking someone's computer, however, I'm sure that most ISP's have some kind of rule against it in their usage policy. This however, is rarely gonna be enforced, and as long as your not doing it to hurt anyone or do something malicious, then it won't be that big an issue.


Thanks,
PuRe

Right now there's no law against it but their soon wil be. part of Patriot Act II (the wrath of george) will make it a fellony to hide or mask the origin of communications (remember that thread about the honeypots?)

It is not for any malicious purpose, and you are communicating with someone who already knows
and likes you; so I say go for it.

As for the legality of it, I seriously doubt that there are any ISP's, governments, and very few
companies that would bother with legal action over such a thing. Even then I am pretty sure
that 99.9% of the cases filed would be civil and not criminal.

All the same, I say if you can no longer play a harmless trick on your girl to get a smile out of her, then
it is a ****ed up world we live in theses days.

Good luck on your date!

jxrry: Real easy if you use outlook or outlook express......

Open either and go to the properties of the internet based mail. There is a "reply to" address so that you can have replied sent to a single mailbox. Change it to whatever you want. It cannot be considered forgery since the headers still show the true source.

I agree with Tiger, when she receives your email the header will show the source of the email. Now if you change that you may run into what you call illegal, but I doubt the FBI would be running in your house anytime soon. Your ISP isn't going to notice most likely, there are thousands (prolly alot more than that) of people out there running Linux on servers and do this all time. Hopefully for you she reads the sender and doesn't dump it right into the junk bin.

Sorry about the lateness of this reply. I did some checking and found that as some others have stated that the laws that apply in the 'real' world are not always applied to the 'virtual' world. However, if she does like you and is not feel threatened or harassed, you're green. If however, something does not work out between you and this e-mail is part of it for whatever reason, it could be construed as Cyber Stalking. However, that is taking it to the extreme (a "credible threat"), and for the regular person this should not even be an issue. I also found as many stated here that ISPs won't react to something like this, unless a complaint is made or malicious activity is detected.

In short - go for it... if you haven't already.

:cool:

I'd bet an email adress with a ? in it won't work..

so I'd say atleast lose the ? at the end..