Most email today is spam, unwanted commercial email, or phishing, fake email designed to separate you from your money. Criminals routinely send fake emails that try to get you to tell them your log$-$in information for your bank or your PayPal account, so they can steal the information, log$-$in as you, and steal your money. It is very easy to fake a return address on an email, so simply looking to make sure that an email has a valid sender is not sufficient to ensure that the email was actually sent by the person or company that claims to have sent it$.$

The objective of this Activity is for you to trace an email you have received to see if the sending address on the email is actually the organization that sent it$.$ There are many tools you can use to trace your email. For this exercise we will use a tool called eMail Tracker Pro, which has a free version that lasts $15$ days. Go to www$.$emailtrackerpro.com and download and install eMail Tracker Pro. When you$$re ready, follow the detail instructions for this activity located on page $53$ in your textbook

Deliverables:

Create a Word document that contains the following information:

A screen capture of the original text message and header information as illustrated in figure $2-18$ in the textbook.

A screen capture of the trace results from emailTrackerPro as illustrated in figure $2-19.$

Develop a $300-400-$word assessment of your findings. Points to consider:

Was the email authentic or spam? What factors did you consider when making that conclusion?

What actions can you take if you suspect that an email is fraudulent an may pose a threat to the receiver if they follow links or instructions in the message?