In message <017a01c708e6$01a6d700$26f38d56@Nick>, at 18:43:55 on Wed, 15
Nov 2006, Nick Landau <[log in to unmask]> writes
>I thought that it was you who gave this or similar advice not so long
>ago, when I made a similar enquiry.
It was.
>Subsequently someone else complained about the technical speak.
Hmm. Don't want to stray too far off topic and be guilty of running a
"how to read your email" tutorial, but as I said before: emails are a
potentially disclosable form of data, so it's perhaps a good idea if
folks understand what data is in an email (most people don't see all of
it, nor I suspect do they disclose the hidden parts)!
Briefly:
An email consists of "headers" and "body" (the message).
In an attempt to be kind to their users, many email programmes only show
a bare minimum of the header information - an extract from it. Such
abbreviated details are commonly: the date/time sent (and if you are
lucky the timezone), the purported sender, the recipient and the
Subject.
But there are many other things in the header, which include (in the
current context) a set of entries whereby the email is "postmarked" by
each of the mail [relay] machines through which it passes.
To interpret this information the user must first expose it to view
(different email software has different schemes for doing this - read
the manual or ask a handy expert), and secondly identify and read the
relevant lines.
The ones which are "postmarks" [Received: headers] are added at the top
each time the email is passed on, so are in 'reverse' order (most recent
at the top). Each such header line is typically three screen lines long
and includes the name and address of the mail relay machines concerned,
and the date and time the hand-over occurred.
It is not unreasonable to expect that most of these hand-overs should
normally happen within a few dozen seconds of one another (although the
clocks on the various machines may not be exactly correct). If it's more
than (say) ten minutes, then there are probably "leaves on the line".
--
Roland Perry
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