How to check if an email is fake or real is sent every day around the world. But email scammers send fake messages that look almost identical to real ones, trying to trick you into clicking on malicious links or giving up personal information. How can you tell if an email is fake or real? There are several ways to check if an email is legitimate. From dissecting email headers to looking for grammatical errors, here are some tips on how to spot the red flags.

Check Whether the Email Address is Legitimate

A good way to check whether an email address is valid is to use online tools such as MX Lookup. This will show you the computer responsible for sending emails from that domain. If the computer is not in the country of the domain, this is a sign that the address might be spoofed or fake.

Another tip is to look at the email display name for non-standard characters. Some scammers use special characters like the Cyrillic “a” (U+0430) to disguise their address and make it harder to detect with standard tools. You can also copy and paste the email address into a Unicode inspector tool to see what letters are used in the address.

Check if Embedded Links Direct to Unexpected Websites

Another thing to watch out for is when the email asks you to reply to a different address than the one in the To field. This is a big red flag, especially for organisations that communicate with customers using email. However, remember that these methods are only aids to your natural skepticism – scammers are constantly evolving their tactics.