The Structure of an Email Message
As you learned in How Internet E-mail Systems Send E-mail, Internet E-mail servers don't really care what is in an E-mail message. However, the software people use to create and read messages certainly does. RFC 822 describes the format of a correct Internet E-mail message. RFC 822 has been extended by several later RFCs, but the basic structure remains the same.
A typical Internet E-mail message that has been transmitted between systems looks something like:
Received: (qmail 32161 invoked from network); 28 Dec 2001 01:22:23 -0000
Received: from mail.somedomain.com (10.45.124.32) by mail.yourdomain.com with SMTP;
28 Dec 2001 01:22:23 -0000
Received: (from user@localhost) by mail.somedomain.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) id
fBS1Mon10019; Thu, 27 Dec 2001 19:22:50 -0600
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 19:22:50 -0600
From: sender@sendingdomain.com
Message-Id: <200112280122.fBS1Mon10019@sendingdomain.com>
To: you@yourdomain.com
Subject: Hello
Hi there, how's it going?
--
You know who
A message begins with several headers, which are formatted lines beginning with a header identifier, followed by a colon and a space, followed by the contents of the header. Many standard header identifiers are specified in RFC 822 and follow-up RFCs. Any other header used for non-standard purposes may be created of the form X-headername:
After the headers comes a blank line, followed by the message body (which doesn't concern us).
Your E-mail software, by default, will only display a subset of the headers found in a typical message, because the rest aren't normally important to you. In order to figure out where a message came from, however, you need to look at the Received: headers.
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