Is this considered spoofing?

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1

I play golf regularly with my father. We sometimes book tee times through this website, www.golfnow.com They offer discount rates on their website, and send you even better discount rates by email.

We have booked a few tee times before at various golf courses in the past, and they always send a (one) confirmation email with a confirmation number and the details of your booked time.

Today I booked a tee time, and received a confirmation email from their normal address, and also a second confirmation email from a hotmail address.

I then sent the hotmail address a response saying basically "who are you and why are you sending me this confirmation in addition to my confirmation email by golfnow?

I got a response from the hotmail account, it turns out it is the head golf pro at the golf course, and they had no idea why I got an email from their address. (they did say golfnow has that email address on file)

At first I figured golfnow sent an email on behalf of them, but then I thought a bit more and realized they sent an email which APPEARED to be from their hotmail address.

Surely golfnow didnt actually send it from the golf pro’s hotmail address, they would have had to log in to their account to do that. It appeared to come from the golf pro’s hotmail address.

This is surely considered spoofing, is it not?

2

It sounds like some sort of spoofing but it may have simply been an error on GolfNow’s part when entering the email address. You can find site rating for that website here: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/golfnow.com/?metric=uv

3

Are you sure they didn’t just use the golfpro address as the “reply to” address? This is fairly common for businesses, to sort out the responses so they don’t all need to be redirected from headquarters.

4

I don’t know the inside-outs of that website. Your best option is to contact them directly.

Eric

5

sded - I received two emails, one from the normal source and the other which appeared to be from the golf pro’s email address. It wasnt really just kind of a “contact here” type deal.

I havent looked into it too much, Ive been so busy. The golf pro at the golf course was supposed to correspond with golfnow.

Thank you for the link Eric.