Wednesday, February 4th, 2009
When diagnosing issues with email delivery and analyzing the properties of an email message, it is almost always the case that one needs to obtain either the “full headers” of the message or the “source” of the message.
The “message source” is the complete raw content that represents the message. This includes all of the “metadata” about the message (who its from and to, the subject, etc.) as well the body content and all of the attachments. The full message source really contains two distinct parts — the full headers and the body. The full headers are at the beginning of the message source and continue until a blank line is reached; one or more blank lines separate the headers from the body.
In this article, we are not going to discuss what is in the headers or body, or how that information is formatted. Instead, we will show you how to retrieve this information when using different kinds of email programs and web-based systems. With these instructions, you should be able to get the “full headers” from any email message located in most email systems. This information can be helpful to your technical support representatives when analyzing message behavior.
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Tags: AOL, classic, email message, entourage, eudora, evolution, gmail, headers, hotmail, internet headers, kde, kmail, mail.app, outlook, Outlook Express, pine, source, the bat!, thunderbird, webmail, windows live, yahoo!
Posted in LuxSci Library: The Technical Side of Email, TechNotes
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Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
Frequently, we are asked to verify if an email that someone sent or received was encrypted using SMTP TLS while being transmitted over the Internet. For example, banks, health care organizations under HIPAA, and other security-aware institutions have a requirement that email be secured at least by TLS encryption from sender to recipient. This can and should be locked down to ensure that the email message content cannot be eavesdropped upon. This check, to see if a message was sent securely, is fairly easy to do by looking the the raw headers of the email message in question. However, it requires some knowledge and experience. It is actually easier to tell if a recipient’s server supports TLS than to tell if a particular message was securely transmitted.
To see how to analyze a message for its transmission security, we will look at an example email message sent from Gmail to LuxSci, and see that Gmail does not use TLS when sending messages, even when it can. This indicates that Gmail is probably not a service to be used when you have any kind of encryption requirements.
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Tags: bank, gmail, google, headers, hipaa, mx logic, private, received, secure, security, smtp, ssl, tls, transmission
Posted in LuxSci Library: Security and Privacy, TechNotes
3 Comments »
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