BCC Identitiy?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Thomas R. Shannon
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Thomas R. Shannon

I got a an email in which I was the blind carbon copy recipient. Now I have
the strong suspicion that the recipients of the email know I got a copy. Is
it possible to extract this information from the headers or is this
definitely my imagination?

Thanks,
Tom S.
 
I got a an email in which I was the blind carbon copy recipient. Now I
have the strong suspicion that the recipients of the email know I got a
copy. Is it possible to extract this information from the headers or
is this definitely my imagination?

It's not possible to extract this information from the headers but it
may be possible to extract this information from the SENDER. Perhaps the
recipients of the e-mail used some interrogation techniques and got the
sender to confess?
Or is it possible that they somehow gained access to the sender's computer
and opened his sent items folder?
 
MVP-OneNote said:
It's not possible to extract this information from the headers but it
may be possible to extract this information from the SENDER. Perhaps
the recipients of the e-mail used some interrogation techniques and
got the sender to confess?
Or is it possible that they somehow gained access to the sender's
computer and opened his sent items folder?

Its highly unlikely. Perhaps the recipients are only guessing. I'm
comforted to know that it couldn't have come from the email. Its the only
concrete link that I know of.

Thanks, again. It's a rather delicate buisness matter where I was an
anonymous arbiter assigned by a neutral party in the case. Some coments
they made gave me a stronger impression than usual that they knew it was me.

Tom S.
 
MVP-OneNote wrote:
Its highly unlikely. Perhaps the recipients are only guessing. I'm
comforted to know that it couldn't have come from the email. Its the
only concrete link that I know of.

Thanks, again. It's a rather delicate buisness matter where I was an
anonymous arbiter assigned by a neutral party in the case. Some
coments they made gave me a stronger impression than usual that they knew it was me.

If you'd like to do an interesting experiment you could BCC a message
to a friend (or a dummy account) while sending it to yourself then open
the message you receive and examine the headers to see if there is any
trace of the BCC information.
I'm confident that you will not find any.
 
Thomas R. Shannon said in news:[email protected]:
Its highly unlikely. Perhaps the recipients are only guessing. I'm
comforted to know that it couldn't have come from the email. Its the
only concrete link that I know of.

Thanks, again. It's a rather delicate buisness matter where I was an
anonymous arbiter assigned by a neutral party in the case. Some
coments they made gave me a stronger impression than usual that they
knew it was me.

Tom S.

Time to start thinking of using e-mail aliases where each party involved
gets the e-mail aliases you have created just for that arbitration but
is distinct from any aliases you have used for other arbitrations.

- Your ISP may provide multiple accounts that you can open. This is
usually limited, like to 5 to 7 extra "member" accounts. You can use
them as regular accounts but you can also delete them when no longer
needed. Some ISP's also providing forwarding of incoming e-mail, so you
could forward e-mails sent to these member accounts to your main or
owner account. However, any replies sent by you will probably end up
going out your owner account. That's why forwarding services are not
safe. They forward an e-mail to your forwarding account, it forwards,
you read it in your main account, and when you reply then you end up
using the main account.

- Use disposable e-mail accounts (more disposable than the member
accounts mentioned above although those can be considered disposable,
too). Again, decide if you want disposable accounts that forward to
your real account since any replies are likely to get sent through your
real account rather than back through the disposable account.

- Use e-mail aliases. Sneakemail and Spamex are a couple examples of
true e-mail alias services. All inbound e-mails go to your alias
account with, say, Sneakemail. Any reply you make will also go back
through the Sneakemail account to ensure all headers get stripped from
your ISP's mail server along with some checking on the content to ensure
your real e-mail address wasn't listed within. I don't know about
SpamEx but I have never hit a limit of how many aliases I can define in
my Sneakemail account. The alias gets released to just one unique
recipient, like a web site when registering as a user, for software
registration, for a game site, or, in your case, the set of parties
involved in an arbitration. You can decide how long to keep the alias
active. You can kill it or just disable it. Any e-mails coming through
that alias are known as to whom that alias was released; i.e., if you
start getting spammed or slammed then you know exactly to whom you gave
that alias.

The Bcc field is NOT part of the e-mail that gets sent. Instead, a list
of the aggregate recipient list is compiled from the To, Cc, and Bcc
fields in generating a list of RCPT-TO commands that your e-mail client
issues to your mail server. The To and Cc fields become part of the
body of the e-mail (header and content are all together and aren't
really separated, as opposed to the envelope used in wrapping that
message and used to deliver it). Only if your e-mail client was broke
or stupid would it insert the contents of the Bcc field into the body of
the e-mail (there are some e-mails clients that still broke this way).
Fact is, the sender can insert any headers they want into the e-mail
body. Delivery is not determined by those headers but instead by the
handshaking commands between the e-mail client and the mail server
(i.e., the RCPT commands specify who gets a copy of that message, not
the headers). If you look at the headers of a received message and see
no Bcc field or anything of your personal information, like an e-mail
address, then no one else saw it, either, as they got the same message
that you got.
 
*Vanguard* said:
Thomas R. Shannon said in news:[email protected]:
The Bcc field is NOT part of the e-mail that gets sent. Instead, a
list of the aggregate recipient list is compiled from the To, Cc, and
Bcc fields in generating a list of RCPT-TO commands that your e-mail
client issues to your mail server. The To and Cc fields become part
of the body of the e-mail (header and content are all together and
aren't really separated, as opposed to the envelope used in wrapping
that message and used to deliver it). Only if your e-mail client was
broke or stupid would it insert the contents of the Bcc field into
the body of the e-mail (there are some e-mails clients that still
broke this way). Fact is, the sender can insert any headers they want
into the e-mail body. Delivery is not determined by those headers
but instead by the handshaking commands between the e-mail client and
the mail server (i.e., the RCPT commands specify who gets a copy of
that message, not the headers). If you look at the headers of a
received message and see no Bcc field or anything of your personal
information, like an e-mail address, then no one else saw it, either,
as they got the same message that you got.

My email address is in the message. I can open it in a text editor like
emacs and do a search and find it among what I assume is the encoding or the
binary or whatever is in the in the *.msg file. I assume this is because
this is the copy of the email that I got and that the copy that they got
won't have any trace of it. True?

Tom S.
 
Thomas R. Shannon said in news:[email protected]:
My email address is in the message. I can open it in a text editor
like emacs and do a search and find it among what I assume is the
encoding or the binary or whatever is in the in the *.msg file. I
assume this is because this is the copy of the email that I got and
that the copy that they got won't have any trace of it. True?

Tom S.

You could show us the headers in your received e-mail (but munge or
x-out your real e-mail address to prevent spambots from harvesting it
here). It may be that your ISP will add the recipient's account to the
header for their portion to show to whom it eventually got delivered.
Other recipients won't see this because they aren't using your e-mail
server which is delivering to your account. It is possible the other
recipients saw your e-mail address depending on where you are seeing it.
Unless we see what you have for headers then we are all guessing. If,
however, your e-mail address is anywhere within the body of the message
then all recipients saw it.
 
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