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An email has two essential parts: the body (or content) and the
headers. The headers are the lines of text at the beginning of an
email that document its travel history.
Headers contain a wealth of information about your email.
They tell you which machines handled your message, and how
long they took to send it to you. They can tell you who
sent the message, and who it was destined for. However,
headers can be misleading. It is fairly simple to write
fake headers, which obscure information about the sender,
recipient, and the machines that handled the mail.
Spammers frequently use fake headers to confuse the people
they spam. And because so few people know how to read
headers, it often works. A working knowledge of email
headers can help you track spam to its source, which makes
it easier to stop spammers in their tracks.
Here, we will analyze four examples of email headers. Two
are from valid emails and two are forged headers from spams.
For more information, the Forum for Responsible and Ethical Email, SpamFree.org, has links to additional resources that
can assist you in reading email headers.
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