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Garuda, firebirds, thunderbirds, and the view from mail headers

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 01 October 2007


Garuda, of course, is the thunder chariot of the Gods of Indus; the mount of Vishnu. Is the freeware email client, Thunderbird, supposed to be Garudian in nature?

Today, I got an email. It was almost certainly failed spam; no subject line, no content, no attachment. It didn't even have a reply-to field filled. So I thought: "I'll look at the mail headers!"

Thunderbird has a "View" menu. One of the options is "headers" and so I clicked that. It showed me all I wanted to know (the mail originated from umail.hinet.net, and that probably explains everything) but also a lot more than I wanted - and I'm no expert on email, so I thought: "I'll forward that to my ISP!"

Wrong. You can't cut and paste the contents of that page (why not?) and my ISP wasn't keen on a screen grab... what to do?

"Control-U" said my friendly guru. Sure enough: if you look on View and select "Message Source" you'll find all the header info there.

Two completely separate "views" of the header, with the same info, but one you can't cut and paste. Absolutely, I'm sure, there's a good reason for this... Probably, that the Thunderbird team inherited some retired programmer from the Outlook team.


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