Email – How Did I Receive an Email with Spammer’s ‘To’ and ‘From’ Headers

emailheadersspam-preventionthunderbird

I tried to check header 1. I see my email address in "Envelope-to: my_email@my_domain.com" but not in To/CC/BCC

  1. how sender is able to do this?
  2. I think I'm not a BCC recepient because Thunderbird didn't tell me about this.

Please see headers below (changed some names):

From - Wed Nov 03 20:54:11 2010
X-Account-Key: account7
X-UIDL: UID4036-1213982649
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                 
Return-path: <rajan@abc.com>
Envelope-to: my_email@my_domain.com
Delivery-date: Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:17:32 -0600
Received: from pro237-180.mxout.rediffmailpro.com
 by my_mailserver.com with smtp (Exim 4.69)
 (envelope-from <rajan@abc.com>)
 id 1PDf5b-0000wT-J1
 for my_email@my_domain.com; Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:17:31 -0600
Received: (qmail 34966 invoked from network); 3 Nov 2010 15:16:24 -0000
X-CTCH-Spam: Unknown
X-CTCH-VOD:  Unknown
X-CTCH-Flags: : 0
X-CTCH-RefID: str=0001.0A0B0207.4CD17D02.01C2,ss=1,pt=DBB_65837,fgs=0
Received: from unknown (HELO Rajan) (rajan@abc.com@122.170.25.63)
  by mailserver with SMTP; 3 Nov 2010 15:16:17 -0000
From: "Rajan Kr. Tahalani" <rajan@abc.com>
To: "Rajan Kr. Tahalani" <rajan@abc.com>
Subject: Diwali Greetings ~ StepStone Manpower Solutions.
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2010 20:48:01 +0530
Message-ID: <005101cb7b6a$51a2ba80$f4e82f80$@com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/related;
 boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0052_01CB7B98.6B5AF680"
X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 12.0
Thread-Index: Act6/TQ1zdEz/sjoQBGWN/etyyH1dwAasROw
Content-Language: en-gb

This is a multipart message in MIME format.

------=_NextPart_000_0052_01CB7B98.6B5AF680
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="----=_NextPart_001_0053_01CB7B98.6B5AF680"


------=_NextPart_001_0053_01CB7B98.6B5AF680
Content-Type: text/plain;
 charset="us-ascii"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Best Answer

How can you see if you are a BCC recipient if you really are a BCC recipient? The nature of BCC is that it hides all the recipients of the message listed in the BCC field...

I've worked with distribution lists before in Outlook, and if I put all my recipients in the BCC field, and my own email/name in the To field, then no one but me can see who else the email was sent to...

Also, the spammer's email address in the To field could be the name of a distribution list... - thus hiding all of the emails that way...

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