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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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E-mail headers | 396 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
E-mail headers
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, April 24 2012 @ 10:03 PM EDT
*Everything* about an email can bd faked. I can easily do it with any text
editor.

Introducing such a forged document in court would be be another matter. I can't
see any attorney in this case taking such a risk.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

E-mail headers
Authored by: tknarr on Wednesday, April 25 2012 @ 11:59 PM EDT

The Received header can be faked. Two different ways:

  • The sending program inserting false Received: headers at the front of the chain, making it appear to have originated elsewhere with the true originating server appearing to be an intermediate server. Sorting this out requires careful examination of the headers, and can be helped by a true originating server that logs detailed authentication information (an intermediate server wouldn't normally be doing an authenticated session when relaying mail).
  • Someone simply edits the text before handing it over. E-mail messages are just text files for the most part, as trivially editable (without leaving any traces) as any other plain text file. Stopping this requires cryptographic signatures. It's one of the reasons I don't trust anything about e-mail headers and if I need to prove the authenticity of a document I'll include all identifying information in the body and sign it using strong cryptography like S/MIME or Enigmail.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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