Is this eBay email real?

I got this email in my inbox that seemingly is from eBay. But is it real? Or is it a fake spam mail that poses as eBay?

Well, let's find out.

1. Normally, eBay's mail will have my real name somewhere in the first few lines of the email. I am not seeing that, which makes me suspicious. Note that even though the email has your real name, it can still be a fake. I have seen spam mails that had my real name that was totally fake. How, they got my name, I don't know. That is why I don't put my name on websites.

Note that I normally have Autopreview on so that I can see the first few lines of an email without images. I also turn Preview Pane off so that I do not see images.

Seeing images on spam email is bad since images can be used as beacons (or darts) to alert spammer that you have viewed the email. When an image is displayed, that image is pulled from the server. The server logs shows if this happens or not. Not only that, with extra trickery, spammers can tell which image of which email have been viewed. If they know that the image on the email sent to your email address have been viewed, they got confirmation that they have an valid active email. In which case, they might sell the email address to other spammers, and it just snowballs from there.

2. If an email is really from eBay, there will be a copy of it when you log into eBay and check your messages section. See this tutorial on how to check your messages on eBay. If you don't have an eBay account, then that type of email can not be from eBay.

I don't see this message in my eBay account. So now I am pretty sure that this is not an message from eBay. It was constructed to look like an eBay message so that you open it, and click on its "Respond Now" button found on the email, and take you to bad spammy places on the internet.

3. As a further confirmation, I want to see the source code of the email message without opening it. So I highlight the email and do File -> Save As to save the htm file on my local disk. Now I can open that file in a text editor.

I want to see where I would go if I click on the "Respond Now" button. And I found this code here...

In addition, the graphic elements used to construct the HTML email is not from the ebay servers.

So this is definitely not an real eBay email.

For related tutorials see sidemenu.