Dude! Where are my headers?

Recently I was asked by several people, what happens with original email headers when honeymail forwards the message.

Once you get spammed you may be curious how the message got to your mailbox - was it sent via open relays, from dynamic IP blocks or from hijacked SMTP server. It’s all in the headers, and you have all of them - always had!

Honeymail’s forwarding process is simple:

  1. Receive email
  2. Check if recipient exists - yes/no (queue/drop)
  3. Do all the checks and generate appropriate message to put inside email
  4. Generate new MIME encoded email and deliver to the recipient
    • New headers (it’s a new message)
    • First MIME part includes check results
    • Second MIME part includes original message (including all the headers)

Now, if your email client accepts ‘inline’ MIME content, check results and original message will be displayed, otherwise you will see only check results and original message will be show as an attachment.

There it is, all the headers you wanted to see.