Message Information
If you are familiar with the Internet, message boards, chat rooms, and
E-Mail you are familiar with message
information headers. Message information headers are text that appears
as error messages on the Internet, text on the top of message boards and
chat rooms, and as header information on E-Mails.
Message information headers appear at the top of your incoming E-Mails
and also on your outgoing E-Mails. If you are using Outlook Express and
cannot see the message information headers on your incoming E-Mails here
is what you must do-
1. Open up an E-Mail by double clicking on it with the right mouse
button.
2. Choose “View” from the top of the E-mail’s toolbar.
3. Click the tab “All Headers”.
By choosing “All Headers”, you will now be able to view all
message information headers available on your incoming E-Mails.
If you are using Netscape Communicator the steps for viewing message
information headers are quite similar.
1. Click on the “Communicator” tab under the Netscape Title
Bar.
2. Select Options
3. Select Messenger
4. Select an E-Mail from the list of E-Mails in your Messenger box.
5. Once you have opened an E-Mail select “Options”.
6. Under the button “Show Headers” select “All”.
“Why should I care about message information headers?” you
may ask. Well, quite simply, message information headers contain quite
a bit of information.
Some of the information revealed by headers are:
· Apparently- to: shows who the E-Mail was sent to
· BCC- stands for Blind Carbon Copy. This means the E-Mail was
copied, but the other recipients E-Mail addresses were hidden.
· CC- stands for Carbon Copy. Shows other recipients of the E-Mail.
· Comments-used by some programs, specifically spammers to create
confusion.
· Content-Transfer-Encoding- Used to interpret the contents of
the E-Mail.
· Content-Type- Tells Clients how to handle the E-Mail’s
contents/
· Date- tells the date the E-Mail was sent.
· From- tells who the E-Mail is from
· In-Reply-To-Gives information when replying to an E-Mail.
· Message-ID- text that identifies the sender of the message.
· Subject- describes the Subject of the message
· To- describes who the E-Mail is sent to
Learn more about Message Formatting: Headers, Payloads and Footers