A Brief Introduction of Yahoo Mail and Its Complete Analysis

In present time, communication through emails is very popular and organizations used various email clients for the exchange of information. Yahoo Mail is one of the web-based email client, used by many organizations and users to fulfill the work requirements. It is the third largest email client and is popular among millions of users. This email client comes with two-configuration i.e., free and business. There are various benefits attached to this email application and one of the most essential is of Yahoo Mail header. It helps to take out the crucial information whenever required. This kind of information is generally required by forensic team to get the exact details of a particular mail. Read the complete informative article on Yahoo Mail Header Analysis.

How to Open Yahoo Mail Header Information

• Firstly, login to the Yahoo account by simply entering ID and Password to the official site of Yahoo.
• Then, open that mail, which you want to analyze and click on the option of "More"

• Once you done that, click on "View Raw Message"

• Now new window will open in, which you can see the header part of that particular mail.

Description of Each Attribute of Yahoo Mail Header

An email consists of various attributes. These attributes can help us for someone who is investigating in a particular case. These attributes are very technical for a non-technical person. So, in the below section we will describe the all the attributes of Yahoo Mail Header.

X-Apparently-To: X-Apparently-To is present in the header to help the software in knowing that the location of the mailbox in, which the message should be delivered. This is important because when some email engines receive an email, they generally break the message. This helps each person to receives a copy

Return-Path: A Return-Path is that value, which is used during the SMTP session. The mail server of recipient is added to Return-Path header. It is added to the top of the mail. The attributes of Return-Path is alike to that of sender's address.

Received-SPF: In Received-SPF, SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework. It used to avoid falsification of the address of the sender. It gives the two value one is "Pass" and the other one is "Fail" indicates that MTA should be rejected from the settled connection. Whereas, "pass" value, indicates that MTA should add a header.

X-YmailISG: X means "Custom Header," YMAIL means "Yahoo Mail," OSG means "Outbound Spam Guard," and ISG means "Inbound Spam Guard"

X-Originating-IP: This is a standard to identify the origin of the IP address of a client, which is connected to the mail service's HTTP front end. When a client connect to the mail server in a direct way, its address is known to the server, but web front ends acts like a proxy connecting internally to the mail server

Authentication-Results: As the name indicates, this header provides the authentication report to the receiver. This report has been provided after the completion of delivery message. This header is important while server is checking and authenticating value for Received-SPF.

DKIM-Signature: This enables a sender to link the name of a domain with each email message. The full form of DKIM is DomainKeys Identified Mxail. It helps in guarantee of domain authenticity. DKIM- Signature can be done by signing the email in a structure, which is digital and this is field added in the header part of each message.

From: This denotes sender's name, who has sent the mail to Yahoo Mail account. It also displays the email id of that entity.

To: This indicates the mail id of the receiver in the same manner of encoding.

Subject: This shows a line that acts as the reason to open the email message.

Date: This header helps in knowing the data and time of the received email in the standard format.

MIME-Version: This file indicates the value of MIME-Version, which is used in email id.

Reply-To: This is same as that of "From" attribute. This is used to know the mail id from where you can give a reply to the sender.

X-job: This is the header, which is added to the message like usual headers to, from, subject, etc. "X" shows the value, which is experimental or an extension.

Cc: CC stands for "Carbon Copy" When you send any email and anyone, who is added by you in cc that person will get the copy of the email you are sending.

Message-ID: This is the ID attached to each of the mail, which is used to identify the emails individually. It acts as a roll number for each email message.

Content-Length: This header shows the number of characters in that particular message.

Conclusion

In the above write-up, we have discussed all the attributes, which are important for the investigation. There are more attributes but, they are only important to service providers. With the help of this article, we have the importance of Yahoo Mail Header Analysis. Read our informative article on Forensic Email Search.