American Public University System discussion

• Exercise Activity 2

Bottom of Form Tracing Your Email

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:

Note: This activity must be completed prior to starting Discussion 2.

Discussion Topic Top of Form Bottom of Form In order to complete this discussion, you need to have completed Exercise 2. Post your deliverables (files and results) as attachments to this discussion post.

Read and respond to at least two other students’ submissions for this topic providing meaningful feedback to their posting by analyzing their SMTP mail trace results. Address the following points when reviewing student results: