I found a faked email conversation on my outlook

Question

I have recently found a faked conversation in my Outlook: an email that I have not written nor sent and a reply from a person that never answered and did not even get the email. Does anybody know how this can be possible?

Answer 1

Its pretty well documented you can do that with windows live mail - IIRC by dragging in a plain text file formatted the same way as an .eml file - and that will get synced into your mailbox - I've not tested it with outlook however. If you have access to acedemic journals - this paper "Pandora’s Email Box? An Exploratory Study of Web-Based Email Forgery Detection and Validation" might be worth reading - since it talks about one way to do so.

Answer 2

I am one of the authors of the paper and the person that discovered the vunerability that you refer to. The technique does not work with Outlook, however if the Outlook account is synchronised with a Hotmail account then any changes to messages in Hotmail will appear in Outlook. The exploit also works with Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Bigpond Mail with varying degrees of success.