miss addressed mail

[Scot L. Harris]

On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 20:10, Mike Witt wrote:

> 
> I'm assuming that 'rmiles' is not an alias for you, right?
> AFAIK, the "for" line (like the line above) is the only indication
> of (for example) a BCCed msg. I've gotten mail which this for
> line was NOT to any alias of mine. I don't know how this happens.
> 
> I would really be curious if someone could comment on whether
> it's possible for someone to get a message to you without ANY
> visible indication of who it's for in the header.
> 

Actually I believe it is possible.  When a message is being sent to an
MTA there is a envelope that contains the from and to information that
is used by the MTA to deliver the message.  The header lines you
typically see in the message are sent as part of the message but are not
really used to deliver the message.

You can see this if you ever telnet to port 25 of an MTA and manually
enter a message.

HELO somedomain.com
MAIL FROM: <bogususer at somedomain.com>
RCPT TO: <youremailID at yourdomain.com>
DATA

After you enter the DATA statement you can enter various header lines
that you see in normal email such as subject:, from:, to:, etc. 

Follow that by the text of the message and end it with a . (period) by
itself on a line.

At that point the MTA should process the message.

As you can see you can put any kind of header in after the DATA line
including bogus to: and from: lines.


> It's possible to see sendmail delivering me the message by
> looking in /var/log/maillog, but still no visible indication
> of WHY it comes to me.
> 
> -Mike
-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

"His eyes were cold.  As cold as the bitter winter snow that was falling
outside.  Yes, cold and therefore difficult to chew..."