Some email headers are relatively simple to decipher. Others take a little more work. Below is the header of email I received several years ago. With a partner, see if you can answer the questions that follow.
Sample Email Header
Received: from cesit1.unifi.it (cesit1.unifi.it [150.217.1.31]) by cloyd.cs.cornell.edu (8.8.8/8.8.8/M-1.9) with ESMTP id MAA20977 for <nihowe@cs.cornell.edu>; Wed, 20 May 1998 12:47:36 -0400 (EDT) Received: from aguirre.dsi.unifi.it by CESIT1.UNIFI.IT (PMDF V5.1-10 #23168) with SMTP id <01IX9LXREOUS0003EB@CESIT1.UNIFI.IT> for nihowe@cs.cornell.edu; Wed, 20 May 1998 18:45:05 MET Received: from ozon180.dsi.unifi.it by aguirre.dsi.unifi.it (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA14320; Mon, 18 May 1998 14:38:33 +0200 Received: by ozon180.dsi.unifi.it (SMI-8.6/SMI-SVR4) id SAA05539; Wed, 20 May 1998 18:43:47 +0200 Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 18:43:47 +0200 From: icmcs99@ozon180.dsi.UNIFI.IT Subject: IEEE Multimedia Systems To: icmcs99@dsi.UNIFI.IT Reply-To: icmcs99@dsi.UNIFI.IT Message-ID: <199805201643.SAA05539@ozon180.dsi.unifi.it> Status: U X-Mozilla-Status: 8001
IEEE MULTIMEDIA SYSTEMS '99, INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MULTIMEDIA COMPUTING AND SYSTEMS (IEEE ICMCS'99) CENTRO AFFARI, FIRENZE, ITALY 7-11 JUNE 1999
To help you out, here are few abbreviations from above:
- ESMTP Extended Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
- EDT Eastern Daylight Saving Time
- MET Middle European Time
Questions
Please answer these ten questions concerning the header. (Not all the information may be in the header itself, but there should be enough that you can figure out the answers based on your other knowledge.)
- At what institution did I receive this message?
- In which country is the host cesit1.unifi.it?
- What is the IP address of the host cesit1.unifi.it?
- What is the IP address of the host aguirre.dsi.unifi.it?
- What is the IP address of the host cloyd.cs.cornell.edu?
- Which of the two hosts, cesit1.unifi.it or aguirre.dsi.unifi.it, processed the mail first, i.e., before the other?
- How would you explain the date and time that aguirre.dsi.unifi.it claims to have received the message?
- At what time EDT (Eastern Daylight Saving Time) do you think the mail was sent? Use hours:minutes:seconds.
- At what time EDT (Eastern Daylight Saving Time) do you think I received the email at cloyd.cs.cornell.edu? Use hours:minutes:seconds.
- Finally, what was then the total transit time, from send to receive, in hours:minutes:seconds?