Re: BCC Identitiy?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance

From: *Vanguard* (no-email_at_reply-to-newsgroup.invalid)
Date: 05/28/04 

Date: Thu, 27 May 2004 23:58:30 -0500

Thomas R. Shannon said in news:ue0so3FREHA.2032@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl:
> MVP-OneNote wrote:
>> On 27 May 2004 14:33, "Thomas R. Shannon" wrote:
>>> I got a an email in which I was the blind carbon copy recipient.
>>> Now I have the strong suspicion that the recipients of the email
>>> know I got a copy. Is it possible to extract this information from
>>> the headers or is this definitely my imagination?
>>
>> It's not possible to extract this information from the headers but it
>> may be possible to extract this information from the SENDER. Perhaps
>> the recipients of the e-mail used some interrogation techniques and
>> got the sender to confess?
>> Or is it possible that they somehow gained access to the sender's
>> computer and opened his sent items folder?
>
> Its highly unlikely. Perhaps the recipients are only guessing. I'm
> comforted to know that it couldn't have come from the email. Its the
> only concrete link that I know of.
>
> Thanks, again. It's a rather delicate buisness matter where I was an
> anonymous arbiter assigned by a neutral party in the case. Some
> coments they made gave me a stronger impression than usual that they
> knew it was me.
>
> Tom S.

Time to start thinking of using e-mail aliases where each party involved
gets the e-mail aliases you have created just for that arbitration but
is distinct from any aliases you have used for other arbitrations.

- Your ISP may provide multiple accounts that you can open. This is
usually limited, like to 5 to 7 extra "member" accounts. You can use
them as regular accounts but you can also delete them when no longer
needed. Some ISP's also providing forwarding of incoming e-mail, so you
could forward e-mails sent to these member accounts to your main or
owner account. However, any replies sent by you will probably end up
going out your owner account. That's why forwarding services are not
safe. They forward an e-mail to your forwarding account, it forwards,
you read it in your main account, and when you reply then you end up
using the main account.

- Use disposable e-mail accounts (more disposable than the member
accounts mentioned above although those can be considered disposable,
too). Again, decide if you want disposable accounts that forward to
your real account since any replies are likely to get sent through your
real account rather than back through the disposable account.

- Use e-mail aliases. Sneakemail and Spamex are a couple examples of
true e-mail alias services. All inbound e-mails go to your alias
account with, say, Sneakemail. Any reply you make will also go back
through the Sneakemail account to ensure all headers get stripped from
your ISP's mail server along with some checking on the content to ensure
your real e-mail address wasn't listed within. I don't know about
SpamEx but I have never hit a limit of how many aliases I can define in
my Sneakemail account. The alias gets released to just one unique
recipient, like a web site when registering as a user, for software
registration, for a game site, or, in your case, the set of parties
involved in an arbitration. You can decide how long to keep the alias
active. You can kill it or just disable it. Any e-mails coming through
that alias are known as to whom that alias was released; i.e., if you
start getting spammed or slammed then you know exactly to whom you gave
that alias.

The Bcc field is NOT part of the e-mail that gets sent. Instead, a list
of the aggregate recipient list is compiled from the To, Cc, and Bcc
fields in generating a list of RCPT-TO commands that your e-mail client
issues to your mail server. The To and Cc fields become part of the
body of the e-mail (header and content are all together and aren't
really separated, as opposed to the envelope used in wrapping that
message and used to deliver it). Only if your e-mail client was broke
or stupid would it insert the contents of the Bcc field into the body of
the e-mail (there are some e-mails clients that still broke this way).
Fact is, the sender can insert any headers they want into the e-mail
body. Delivery is not determined by those headers but instead by the
handshaking commands between the e-mail client and the mail server
(i.e., the RCPT commands specify who gets a copy of that message, not
the headers). If you look at the headers of a received message and see
no Bcc field or anything of your personal information, like an e-mail
address, then no one else saw it, either, as they got the same message
that you got. 

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