Understanding Mail Messages

Here we dissect an email massage to give an understanding of how email is transmitted and what an email message comprises of.

• Mail messages consist of two parts: a header and a body
• Header consists of a number of lines at the beginning of the message
• Body consists of the actual text of the message

Sample Email Message

 Return-Path: <opt!opt.kpi.kiev.ua!vladimir@gar.kiev.ua>
Delivery-Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 14:49:58 +0100 Received: from
logrus.rada.kiev.ua (actually host 195.230.148.1) 
          by sentinel.cs.cf.ac.uk with SMTP (PP);
          Tue, 23 Sep 1997 14:46:30 +0100 Received: from polytech.kiev.ua
([194.44.128.5]) 
          by logrus.rada.kiev.ua (8.6.12/0418) with ESMTP id QAA02474 
          for <dave@cs.cf.ac.uk>; Tue, 23 Sep 1997 16:39:41 +0300 Received: from
opt.UUCP by polytech.kiev.ua with UUCP id QAA07291;
          (8.6.12/zad/1.1) Tue, 23 Sep 1997 16:27:44 +0300 Received: by
opt.kpi.kiev.ua (UUPC/@ v6.14e, 07May95);          
          id AA30288 Tue, 23 Sep 1997 15:01:32 +0400 To:
Dave.Marshall@cs.cf.ac.uk Message-Id: <AAB6w9qWN9@gar.chik.kiev.ua>
Organization: Russian Department X-UIDL: 875022733.001 From: Vladimir
<vladimir@gar.chik.kiev.ua> Date: Tue, 23 Sep 97 15:01:31 +0400 X-Mailer: BML
[MS/DOS Beauty Mail v1.36h] Return-Receipt-To: vladimir@gar.chik.kiev.ua
Subject: Test Message Lines: 21 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 646


Dear All

This is the body of this test message ......

Mail Headers

Note: Mail Drop does not usually show the complete mail header. Click on the Header button in the application to view the header.

• The Received statements indicate the path the message took, as well as the times, dates, and what programs were being used each step of the way
• Notice that a long the way the message was received by the following station
• id AA30288 Tue, 23 Sep 1997 15:01:32 +0400
  • AA30288 represents a local identifier associated with the message
  • Tue, 23 Sep 1997 15:01:32 +0400 represents the time the message was received by this station
• Since the Internet spans the globe, its users are in many different time zones
• The Internet has adopted Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the standard
• Sometimes referred to as Universal Time (UT)
• The +0400 indicates that the message was received 0400 hours later than GMT