[muglo] Re: Beg pardon! Help requested

>Can it be known by the headers or somesuch whether an email is sent from a 
>Mac or another platform?

Yes, within reason. I cannot tell right now whether you or anyone else on 
this mailing list is using Mac, Windows, C64, whatever because of the nature 
of the mailing list software.

However, any time you send a personal message (unless you falsify headers 
like spammers) your originating IP address (so, yes, I could tell whether 
you were writing this from your own machine) and e-mailer are listed in the 
header of your e-mail.

Actually, as an aside, one strategy anti-spam software writers are finding 
to be somewhat successful is to search headers for IP addresses of known 
"leaky" e-mail servers. Oftentimes spammers will falsify their headers, 
*but* they cannot falsify headers once the e-mail has left their machine. 
They use compromised e-mail servers to do their dirty work, but as soon as 
someone finds out what server is compromised all traffic originating from 
that IP can be blocked until the owner of the server secures the server 
against future abuses.


>If so please show me how.

View "header" or "source" for your e-mail. Every e-mailer worth a grain of 
salt (ahem Netscrape ;) has this functionality (actually, even Netscrape 
Communicator may have this option). If you're using a "free" service like 
Hotmail you can turn on advanced headers in the Options, or in Yahoo you can 
see the header with a click of the mouse button.

Once you see the source, you can search for a string identifying the 
originating e-mailer (& it'll often say Windows or Macintosh and something 
like Eudora, Outlook Express, Entourage, "Mozilla 1.4 (Macintosh)"). You can 
also figure out the legitimate originating machine of the e-mail (unless 
it's spam with a falsified header) by searching for the earliest IP.

Using OS X's Network Utilities application you can do a DNS lookup on the IP 
address and find out the name of the "owner". In my case, you'd find that 
one of my computers is "macfiend.botany.utoronto.ca" and belongs to a 
certain IP address (e.g. 128.100.165.222).

Eric

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