What address was this email sent to?
It sounds like a simple question but one I can’t find the answer to. If someone knows how then please let me know.
I have an email sitting in my inbox which I myself sent out from the A-Soc email account an hour ago. It’s To: address is sent back to the A-Soc email account and all the addresses are done via blank carbon copy. Therefore there is no record in the headers as to which address the email is sent.
So later on my mail client goes and checks all my mailboxes, downloads the email and puts them into my inbox. But doesn’t say which account it got the email from. It simply expects that information to be obtained from the email headers. Thunderbird and Outlook Express are both guilty of it. You would think in the days of such frequent phishing scams that much up emails to mail boxes would be a pretty standard feature. Apparently not.
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This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Rants, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 23rd, 2007 at 2:04 pm
E-Mail is a simple protocol. Nothing is mandatory. Knowing where its from is thus not essential in the header for delivery. If you sent a mail from a server to its self, even with anti spam solutions invoked, it would sense that the sender was the same server and so despite missing headers it still wont care. Its like sending an e-mail to localhost.
To prove this, try setting up an SMTP server on your linux box and sending an e-mail to your username with no headers save the to address. You’ll see what I mean.
September 24th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I don’t want it in the message itself, I just want my email client to remember which server/account it downloaded the email from.