When you look at an email sent or received, what you see is the body of the message, the subject, the sender and the recipient. At the top, however, you can expand the header (usually there is a button to see these details) which contains a very confused coded text, which, however, actually says a lot about who sends the email.
Each time you send an email, in addition to the content of the message, a hidden header is also sent containing the technical transmission information.
To protect your privacy it can be useful to know if the email service we use to send emails leaves information about us in the header that can be read by recipients.
The email headers aren't that they are very easy to read and still remain mysterious even for the more experienced.
To see an example, go to your inbox, open a received message and then find out what is called the header of the email.
Instructions for opening headers in Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail or Outlook.com and for Outlook, Thunderbird or other programs can be read in the updated help on this page.
What is written in the header is a register of the passages from one postman to another, that is, from one server to another until reaching the recipient.
Each time a message is sent, it is sent on several servers until it reaches its final destination.
To track the whole transaction, a complete card is created of everything that has happened since the email left the sender, showing all the routing information and the servers where that message was before it arrived at the recipient (including the sender's address).
The header is very useful to help automatic systems understand if an email is Spam.
When you look through a header, you don't understand much but you will notice several IP addresses (four groups of numbers from 0 to 255, separated by dots).
Starting from the oldest information, from the bottom to the top, there is an IP address between two round and square brackets ([and]) preceded by the words Received .
This represents the sender's IP address which, if the person does not use a proxy to send e-mail, is likely to coincide with the IP address of his computer used at the time the e-mail was sent.
In another article we have seen how it can be found from where an Email is sent to trace the sender from the email address .
Not all email providers spread the sender's IP address in the Email header (making emails traceable)
To find out if the provider used includes the IP address of your PC, you can use the free Email Leak Test service .
It is a website that first identifies our computer with the detected IP address and then asks to send an empty email to a specific email address to analyze its header.
Wait a few minutes leaving the Email Test page open until it automatically updates with the results.
If the IP address previously detected appears in the header, then it means that you are sending the exact information of your location every time you send an email.
For example, if you use Gmail you can see that the IP address is not included in the header, which instead appears clearly if you use Gmail with programs like Thunderbird or Microsoft Outlook.
As for the other two most popular email services, we note that IP addresses are hidden when using Outlook.com, while it is not so for Yahoo Mail that displays the sender's IP address in the header of the message and its emails. are traceable.
If it turns out to send traceable emails and then to use an e-mail service that spreads the position from which we send the bad emails (at least for me), the important thing is to know it and, if necessary, take precautions by changing the mail provider or better yet, using a service for anonymous surfing or a private VPN or using one of these email encryption tools.
