Today's tutorial will be aimed at more advanced users. We will show you how to display the header of an email in the native Mail application in macOS, thanks to which we can check whether the email we received is not fraudulent. In every email there is a so-called header - that is, a part that you normally don't see. This header contains complete information about the email you just received. Here you can find, for example, the IP address of the sender, but also, for example, the country from which the e-mail was sent or, for example, e-mail address aliases. In short, everything you need to distinguish a fraudulent email from the real one.
In most cases, we can recognize a fraudulent email at first glance. Usually, there are grammatical errors or "English-Czech" in such an email, i.e. English, which was translated into Czech by a translator. Images are often included in the fraudulent email. Sometimes scammers really care and send an almost perfect email – the name the email comes under looks right, even the sentences make sense and the pictures look the way they should. Most often, in this case, you are struck by the fact that you do not expect such a mail at all. It is in this case that you are offered the option to use the option to display the complete header of the e-mail. So let's see together how to do it.
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How to display the complete email header in Mail
In order to see the complete header, it is first necessary to move to the native application on our Mac Mail. Now click on it in the Mail application email for which we want to display the header. Then move the cursor to the top of the screen where the bar is located. We select an option in the bar Display and from the drop-down menu we select about half of the options Message -> All headers. The e-mail header is then immediately displayed, so you can easily read what you need from it. For example, if you receive an e-mail from a bank, it will be easiest for you to look at the last line of the header, where the line should be in the case of a genuine e-mail Security: Signed.
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By viewing the complete header, you can easily determine whether an incoming email is fraudulent or a hoax. If you are familiar with IT, I believe that all this information will be useful for you to recognize a possible fraudulent email. The header contains all the information. The header itself is of course in English, so at least a basic knowledge of English is desirable. Some lines represent characters in the hexadecimal system that do not tell you much, but apart from this information, you can simply view the time and date of sending the email, the name and IP of the server from which the email was sent, and more - usually this information is in the Received line, i.e. Received from. Using this information, you can compare whether the email really came from where it was supposed to. If, for example, you are expecting an email from Česká spořitelna, which has the domain csas.cz, the incoming email should also come from the domain csas.cz, if from Microsoftat, so from microsoft.com, in case Appyou can find it here apple.com etc.
For those not in the know, there is a Security line, which indicates that the mail has some kind of "certificate" that confirms authenticity - but the company that sent this mail must own this certificate. So don't count on the fact that if one of your friends sends you an e-mail, it will contain a certificate. However, in the case of banks, behind which fraudsters very often hide, verification through a certificate is certainly good. Banks usually have a certificate at their disposal. Anyway, I hope you don't get any scam emails and you won't have to use this tool often.
