Significance of "Envelope-to"

[Paul Hodges]

On Sun, 24 Oct 99 20:54:05, John Drabik wrote:

>  How does one
>  manipulate the "Envelope-to:" section, and can it effectively act as
>  a "blind-copy"?

At the SMTP level the addressing of an email is not determined by the
To: header at all - it is only determined by the SMTP "envelope"
which is not actually part of the message, though it is sometimes
duplicated in the message headers as a commentary.

There are many ways to generate a message as you describe (it is
routinely done by spammers), but a normal email client will do it
using a BCC, and PMMail will do it if a message is bounced (other
clients have different terms and mechanisms for this one).  It can
also happen if a mail is addressed to a mailing list in some clients.

Paul Hodges
QBS Software Ltd