Forwarding Address: OS X

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Mail.app helps phishers

One of the "smart" things Mail.app does with addresses is to display your name in the To: line of messages sent to you -- even when the sender used only your address. The image here shows the top of a phishing mail I got this morning. The real headers (View > Message > Raw Source) don't contain my name, but the displayed ones do. Consider the PayPal "Protect Yourself" guidelines, which note that "emails from PayPal will address you by your first and last name." They're talking about the salutation, but that's a pretty fine point for a novice user, who might see the message I got and say, "Well, they addressed me by name..." Automatic association of names with email addresses is nice generally. But in this context Apple should turn it off. Sez me.

3 Comments:

  • Mail.app's "Smart Addresses" are responsible for this. You can turn them off under View->Addresses, but perhaps you're right that Apple might not ought to use this by default.

    By Anonymous, at 7:39 AM  

  • This post has been removed by the author.

    By pbx, at 7:55 AM  

  • This is not "Smart Addresses," actually. That feature shows *only* the name (no address at all) for addresses in your Address Book or previous recipients.

    By pbx, at 7:58 AM  

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