TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Might iOS Mail hiding sending address be leading cause of successful phfishing?

3 pointsby pardnerover 4 years ago
When designing a internal CRM we incorporated a few extra features such always displaying link addresses (mailto and url), which works so well at making the majority of phfishing emails so obvious I just cringe every time I use IOS Mail.<p>Which got me to wondering if IOS Mail&#x27;s refusal to add a setting to display the sender&#x27;s email address right in the inbox might actually be a leading cause of successful phfishing attacks... If you can see right in your inbox that &quot;xyz.abc@def.jp&quot; is claiming to be &quot;Rackspace Support&quot; and was the sender of &quot;Important notice regarding your Rackspace account&quot; there is NO need to open or interact with the obviously fake email... wipe left and be done with it.<p>But Apple (and other clients) continues to not only hide that important info by default, but does not provide an option to display it in the inbox. (Even Apple&#x27;s Mac Mail client development team has made some ill-informed decisions in this regard.)<p>Of course, an IOS user CAN see the sender&#x27;s email... after they OPEN the email, TAP the sender name, then TAP it again. For every message. Explain THAT to your grandparents.<p>I suspect the extra steps mean it only gets used by more sophisticated users who sniff something pfishy about the email itself. Not the people who need it most.<p>It seems to me that any responsible email client provider ought to recognize the importance of the sending email address as a first line of defense against the simpler attacks such as the example above.<p>IMO a 2nd line of defense email clients ought to add is link-expanders too. For example in our system if the link label includes &quot;homedepot.com&quot; but the actual url is not a homedepot.com url we expand it to look something like &quot;NOTICE: see more at www.homedepot.com LINKS TO xyz.abc@def.jp&quot; right in the email and remove the active link.<p>Link expansion makes pretty marketing emails look not-so-pretty.<p>It also makes the most common bad-guy emails we see stick out like a sore thumb.

1 comment

slaterover 4 years ago
Phishing.<p>And yes, it’s a known issue not just in iOS&#x2F;macOS mail, but other mail software, too.