Reading e-mail headers -- 18.217.4.250

Your IP: 18.217.4.250

Reading e-mail headers

1. Reading e-mail headers is occasionally needed to diagnose a delivery, or a spam marking or filtering issue. Occasionally we ask that a customer send us one or more of the following:

the Message-ID: (one line)
full Received: lines
full X-Spam spam filtering marks

2. We have taken a real piece of spam, removed the customer name for privacy purposes, and marked it so you as a customer may 'see' what we at 'support' see when we read the 'full headers' of an e-mail. With this knowledge, you can help get us the three pieces of information we usually need to diagnose a problem accurately, when taken in combination with the log files we maintain:

Color	Field
Green	Received:
Blue	Message-ID:
Red	X-Spam

3. All reading commences at the left hand margin, and continues to the end of the line. When copying something onto the clip-board, if a line 'carries over' for more than one line, please include all content until the next line which starts with a value, terminated by the separator of a 'colon' and a 'space' [i.e.: ": "]

4. In the example, the following are found:

Field (Color)

Field Contents

Received:

Received: from mail.iwaynet.net ([unix socket])
     by mail.iwaynet.net (Cyrus v2.3.7-Invoca-RPM-2.3.7-12.el5_7.2) with LMTPA;
     Wed, 13 Aug 2014 12:05:21 -0400
Received: from smtp.iwaynet.net (smtp.iwaynet.net [198.178.231.131])
     by mail.iwaynet.net (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id s7DG5La5025599
     (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=OK)
     for <privacy@iwaynet.net>; Wed, 13 Aug 2014 12:05:21 -0400
Received: from gurkhas.wholebody.eu (gurkhas.wholebody.eu [173.232.203.88])
     by smtp.iwaynet.net (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id s7DG58fp029299
     for <privacy@iwaynet.net>; Wed, 13 Aug 2014 12:05:22 -0400
Received: by 0575147d.gurkhas.wholebody.eu
     (amavisd-new, port 13762) with ESMTP id 05CDIBUJYX7514KFAGDSOQ7D;
     for <privacy@iwaynet.net>; Wed, 13 Aug 2014 09:05:20
     -0700

Message-ID:

Message-ID:
     <5762QBGCBGQTK91553275-privacy=iwaynet.net@gurkhas.wholebody.eu>

X-Spam

X-Spam-Score: 1.335 (*) HTML_MESSAGE,MIME_BASE64_TEXT,MIME_HTML_MOSTLY,RP_MATCHES_RCVD,SPF_PASS,T_REMOTE_IMAGE,WEIRD_QUOTING
X-Spam-Level: *
X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.71 on 198.178.231.131

5. Please click each of the following two links, in the sub-section of this page: Sample headers

6. This will open two new panels in your web browser, so you may compare the 'colorized' email, and the flat text original, as shown above:

Sample headers

HTML form
Plain TXT form