At 8:50 AM -0800 12/10/01, Robert Van De Weghe wrote:
> How can something not even addressed to a real person get distributed to
>four people in our office.
OK. This has been asked so many times - and answered, albeit confusingly -
that I think it's time for a long treatment of the subject. If you find
this useful, please feel free to reuse it elsewhere, attribution
appreciated.
An e-mail is like a physical business letter. Addresses appear both on the
envelope and on the letter itself. And, just like a business letter,
there's no guarantee that these addresses will match.
The receiving mail server is very much like an efficient mailroom, which
looks at the addresses on the envelope and sends copies of what's in the
envelope (without looking at it, since that would be impolite) to every
address on the envelope.
So let's say that someone sends out a letter which has the address of the
White House on the letter itself, but sends it out in an envelope addressed
to you. Is the President going to get that letter? No, of course not -
the postman is going to look at the envelope's address and deliver the
letter to your mailbox; he never sees the address on the letter itself.
In the same way, the only delivery address that matters on an e-mail is the
"envelope" information - which does not appear in the e-mail itself, not
even in the headers, and need not match the headers. You can't EVER tell
by looking at the "To:" or "CC:" addresses in the headers just how the
envelope was addressed.
In SIMS, the only way you can tell how the envelope was addressed is to
look at the logs. Typically, log entries like the following:
23:09:13 2 SMTP-856([207.229.58.83]) {S.0000070972} received, 2498 bytes
23:09:13 2 SYSTEM [S.0000070972]
<00003864590e$00002bd5$[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 0+3 From:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
23:09:13 2 SYSTEM(POP) [S.0000070972] delivered to (mikelee)
mean that the envelope was addressed to "mikelee", regardless of what the
headers in the message say. (It's possible that it was delivered to
mikelee due to some other routing within SIMS - for example, the mail could
have been addressed to a distribution list which had mikelee on it - but
the log will somewhere show every address to which the envelope was
addressed.)
To sum up: any header after the first "Received:" header, which SIMS puts
onto the message, may be bogus. Don't rely on them for anything whatsoever.
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