George said:
We have multiple emails as most businesses do, and most all spam I get, I
can tell which email it was sent TO by just (in Outlook) clicking View >
Options > then studying the headers.
But I'm seeing some spam email that appears to be going to emails I don't
recognize at all
Sure, the spammer always hides his FROM email, but I thought you could
always see which email he sent it TO (which of course "has" to be one that
the recipient owns).
Are there ways to see the TO address if it's not (accurate) in the header?
The headers are not used to route e-mails. The e-mail client sends a
RCPT-TO command to the SMTP server to tell it where to deliver an e-mail,
and that doesn't have to be a destination noted in a header. The headers
are just part of the e-mail message. They are part of the data the user
puts into their e-mail. When the user sends e-mail, there is just one
message sent. Headers are separated by a blank line from the body but the
headers, blank line, and body are all just the one message sent to the SMTP
server.
Once the sender sends their message, thereafter the sender has no control
over additional headers added to their message. Each mail server will
prepend a Received header, so you trace backwards from the topmost Received
header since that is the newest one (the topmost one will be the one added
my your mail server when it received the message, and it may or may not
specified the target e-mail account). Just be careful not to include any
bogus headers. As mentioned, the user can put anything they want into the
message. The header section is just more data in the one message that gets
sent and is NOT what necessarily gets used to specify the recipient to the
SMTP server. Bulk mail servers could care less about the headers in a
message, if there are any, because the user sends the message to be sent to
the bulk mailer and then separately sends a list of recipients.
If you want to see through which account a message was received, add the
E-mail Account column to the header list pane. You could also define a rule
to move messages received through a specific account into a different
folder; i.e., you could create separate folders into which new mails get
moved (from the Inbox) depending on which account they came through.
