An email application with active spoof monitoring and control

Spoofing is a serious security issue for email applications. Although several anti-email spoofing techniques have been developed, most of them do not provide users with sufficient control and information on spoof attacks. In this paper a web-based client oriented anti-spoofing email application is proposed which actively detects, monitors and controls email spoofing attacks. When the application detects a spoofed message, it triggers an alert message and sends the spoofed message into a spoof filter. Moreover, the user who has received the spoofed message is given the option of notifying the real sender of the spoofing attack. In this way an active spoof control is achieved. The application is hosted using the HTTPS protocol and uses notification messages that are sent in parallel with email messages via a channel that has been secured by the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol. The notification messages allows the application to detect spoofed emails. The application has been developed in PHP using the Netbeans IDE and provides a user-friendly interface which is easily deployable over the web.