Memana said in news:
[email protected]:
Hi All,
Suppose I got a mail from somebody with "To" as my mail id.
But I would like to know whether it has a bcc or not. (I dont want to
know to whom the bcc, but just want to know whether the bcc is there
or not. Is there any tool or add-on componenet available to use with
Outlook?)
Please help,
TIA,
Memana A
The To, Cc, and Bcc headers are used by you client to compile a list of
RCPT commands that get sent to your mail server to tell it where to
deliver your message. They are ALL optional fields; i.e., they may
appear zero or one times. They are NOT used to direct your message.
They are part of the *data* that gets sent during the DATA command to
the mail server. Nothing of the RCPT commands get recorded within the
message. You as the recipient will never know for sure to exactly whom
the message was delivered for a copy that you receive as even the To and
Bcc header can contain just about anything. It is possible that some
e-mail clients may actually insert the Bcc header into the DATA stream
sent to the mail server but that violates common usage (but does not
violate RFC 2821 which merely states that the Bcc header, if included by
the e-mail client, SHOULD get stripped from the body of the message).
It is highly unlikely that you will ever see a Bcc header in any e-mails
that you receive, so there will nothing you can test to check if others
received a copy. In fact, the sender may send one copy at a time to
each recipient or they can specify multiple recipients by using multiple
RCPT commands to the mail server but you'll know. Even if a dozen
recipients are listed in the To header, that is part of the *data*
compiled by the sender as the body of their message sent in the DATA
command and may not even match the list of recipients specified by the
RCPT commands. The RCPT command from the e-mail client to the mail
server is what dictates to where the message gets sent, not the To, Cc,
and Bcc headers. The use of multiple RCPT commands permit sending a
message to multiple recipients within the same session with the mail
server rather than having to create a new session each time for each
recipient (i.e., it is more efficient to issue multiple RCPT commands
than to establish multiple sessions with the mail server).
You can even get spam where the To header has even more spam in it, like
"To: Anyone interested in viagra", and which may not even be valid
syntax for an e-mail address. Any additional headers added by the mail
servers, like the Received headers, only present information regarding
how that particular copy of the message got delivered to you. The
sending mail server does not include a list of all the RCPT commands
that were used to route a particular message.
If you want to know if a message has been delivered to more than just
you then you will have to ask the sender (and assume they are truthful).
