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What are email message
headers? Most mail readers (email client ie: MS Outlook, Eudora, etc.) do not display the header because it contains information for computer to computer routing. The information that you usually get to see from a normal email header are; Subject, Date, From, Reply, To |
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If you are using MS Outlook Express and you want to take a look at the FULL message headers: >highlight the message >right click >properties >detail. For Eudora users; Select Tools, Options, and Fonts & Display to Show all headers Every time an e-mail moves through a different mail server, a new Received header line is added to the beginning of the message headers list. It means that as you read the Received headers from top to bottom, you are moving closer to the computer or person that sent you the email. If the header shows more than one Received, there is the possibility that the sender have added one or more false Received header to fool and redirect the recipient to another location or to prevent them from finding the true sender.
Example of a typical email message header
Received:
from mx3po.yahoo.jp (mx3po.yahoo.jp [192.228.128.53]) |
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with SMTP id <0GZT00A9Z41NXN@ipop2.net.fr> Basically, email consist of: (1) The envelope (2) headers (3) Message body
(1)
Envelope
(2) headers are used by the
user agent and each header field contains a name, followed by a colon, followed by the field
value. (3) Message body is the content of the message from the sender to the recipient and transferred using the DATA command--the headers are sent first, followed by a blank line, followed by the body. Each line transferred using the DATA command must be less than 1000 bytes.
The user agent takes what the sender specify as a body,
adds some headers and passes the result to the
MTA
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