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RE: Can you tell a real Facebook e-mail from a phishing attempt?

CobraA1 29th Aug

@ this thread

OMG, you're all nuts.

Let's get a few things straight:

- The flagging system of ZDNet is for spam and abuse, not for disagreement.
- Encryption prevents people from reading your email without the right key.
- Digital signatures are for confirming identity.
- Encryption technologies are used for digital signing - they're the same technology used in different ways.

"Afterall, I can register a fake domain, and a certificate for my domain that claims to be Facebook or anyone else."

Sure, you can claim to be facebook, but your domain name will never be facebook.com, and your digital signature will never work with facebook.com. If you try to send email from facebook.com using your digital signature, it will fail because the digital signature does not match the domain name.

ONLY the digital signature given to the domain name facebook.com will EVER match the digital signature of facebook.com. This makes it a lot harder to pretend to be somebody else.