Chain Emails

[Uzoma]

Is it actually possible to trace emails? If I forward an email to someone, is there the actual technology for someone to remotely check who it was forwarded to, ad infinitum?

[andy-hughes]

It is possible - but not by individual users.

E-mail providers usually have the technology to track mails in and out of their sites, but this technology is not available to users - the constant 'checking' traffic would cause the WWW to have the microchip equivalent of a seizure, and it would fall over.

[white_crocs]

Hi

Its actually possible to gather some information so long as your mail client allows you to view the message headers but it will only show you details of the systems used to send the mail to you, not anything beforehand - but this information relates to internet based mail only - if you are referring to corporate systems like Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, there are tools within to track mails as companies may be obliged to store this kind of information.

I've just joined answerbank today so I'll use my sign-up welcome message as an example:

Return-Path: <[email protected]>
Received: from ebm2.cheetahmail.com (ebm2.cheetahmail.com [207.251.96.126])
by myhost.co.uk (8.14.1/8.13.8) with SMTP id m24HIMaA002946
for <[email protected]>; Tue, 4 Mar 2008 17:18:23 GMT
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2008 17:18:44 -0000
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?AnswerBank_Registration?= <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Received: (qmail 13842 invoked by uid 108); Tue, 4 Mar 2008 17:18:44 -0000
Reply-To: =?iso-8859-1?q?AnswerBank_Registration?= <[email protected]>
Subject: =?iso-8859-1?q?The_AnswerBank_Registration_for_white_crocs?=
To: [email protected]
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-myhost.co.uk-MailScanner-Information: Please contact the ISP for more information
X-myhost.co.uk-MailScanner: Found to be clean
X-myhost.co.uk-MailScanner-From: [email protected]
X-Spam-Status: No

[white_crocs]

In the above headers, the Received From information is important as it describes the machine(s) used to transmit the message from the answerbank sign-up to my system before being delivered to me. This machine name or IP address can be checked using http://www.whois.net/ to see more information.

It might not be the best example as the originator is a system process, not a person, however if you check an email from a person, you may be able to identify the network address of the machine used to send the mail before it is processed by an ISP mail system, and also it may provide information about the mail client used.

Message headers can be used to identify whether or not a message is genuine if there are any doubts as quite often the hostname or IP of the sending machine can be traced to a country you would not expect or even identified an account used by consumers (broadband/dialup) by putting the IP addresses into http://tools.whois.net/whoisbyip/

Hope this helps.

WC