Reading out the email header: How to proceed
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If you read out the email header, you can receive various information about an email that was sent that is otherwise not visible. In this article we explain what information you can find in the email header.
Read email header - this information is hidden
An email contains more information than you can see at first glance. You can find information about the recipient, the sender and the IP address of the sender, somewhat hidden. This allows you to check whether the sender is obscuring information. This can be helpful for so-called phishing mails.
- To view the information, you must first open the email in your email account. How you proceed depends on the provider. Most of the time, you will find the source text of the header under "Options", "View", an exclamation mark or similar view options.
- You can find the sender in the "Return Path" and "From" sections (marked red in our example). You cannot do much with this information, however, because the email address is not checked for correctness by the mail server and therefore serious-looking addresses can also be falsified.
- You can see the recipient's information in the "To" sections, for other email providers also "Delivered To" or "Envelope To". In our example this is shown in yellow.
- The information on the sender's IP address is shown in green in the example. It is described as "Received From". This is the recipient's actual email and IP address and cannot be tampered with. You will find the IP address in the first square bracket.
Use the information about the IP address
In this section we explain how to use the IP address of the email and find out where the email really comes from. The instructions only work under Windows.
- Go to "Start" and select the "Run" function. This is how you get to the command line. Now type "cmd" and click "Ok". Then enter the command "nslookup IP address". Instead of the word "IP address", insert the actual IP address from the header.
- A name for a mail server is now displayed. You can compare the name with the name of the mail server that you found in the header. If you are different, the actual mail server has been disguised.
- If the name of the two mail servers is different, this can be an indication of a phishing email. Note, however, that not every phishing email uses a disguised mail server. Even if the names match, it can be a phishing mail.
In the next article, we'll give you more tips on how to recognize phishing emails.