I know I don't have much info on this problem/question so I will delete if everyone downvotes or votes to close/delete.
Is it possible for someone to make an email look like I sent it simply by me opening an email from them? I'm not a IT expert so I might be asking a very stupid question.
The situation is this: my friend was accused of sending an email to everyone in his office, airing some dirty laundry of a high up exec. My friend said he didn't send it but doesn't know how to deal with the accusation from the high up exec.
At his office, there's one central computer that everyone by policy is supposed to log into 1-2x a day to check email. He said all he did was go to this computer, logged in as himself to check email per the office policy, saw this message and clicked on it. The message he clicked on/read was the exact same email everyone else received, yet he's accused to be the one who sent it because the time he logged in on the community computer was around the same time the email was to have been sent (according to some "logs"). My friend isn't technical so I don't know the mail system, OS, or network of the office.
What might have allowed someone to do this to him? For this situation, with a common community computer, I thought about a keystroke logger and after stealing his pwd, someone installing some script that executes on login. I also thought about a malicious email payload and that he got unlucky and was the first one to click on it.