With all the junk e-mail that's going around these days, the last thing you ned to worry about is whether a freind's message is actually written by someone else. Unfortunately, now you do, thanks to a problem called "spoofing."

It's similar to "phishing" - which we have discussed before - but instead of being fake e-mail that aims to steal your credit card and social security numbers, this is USUALLY (but not always) more benign.

Viewer Dawn Jensen wrote to say that her e-mail address had recently been spoofed and mail in her name was sent out, using a newspaper site's "e-mail this article" feature.

Some thoughts on dealing with this.

• BE SKEPTICAL: If any message you get from a friend's address doesn't "sound" right - the language, the tone, etc - be skeptical.
• DON'T POST ON WEB WITH YOUR BEST ADDRESS: This is how they harvest your address. You shouldn't use your best address when visiting chat rooms and message boards.
• CREATE MULTIPLE ADDRESSES: Use different addresses for different things. For instance, you might create an address called "TonyLists@..." for all your mailing lists - it would help to have Tony as your name, of course!
  You can get a free address at Yahoo or Hotmail.
• BEWARE OF FAKE COMPANY MAIL: More on the phishing scam here.
• LEARN ABOUT DANGERS OF IDENTITY THEFT: Also see my piece on preventing identity theft.

Write to techguru@sree.net and let me know your thoughts.