Abstract: X-RZG-FWD-BY means that an e-mail cannot be
delivered (address wrong or out of date) and therefore was forwarded to another
similar address.
Description
Each e-mail
contains a header containing sender, addressee(s) and subject. Besides these
there are more entries which are hided mostly. The description of most entries
is well known and described multiply. Some days ago, however, I found an entry
for which a looked in the internet without success. Therefore I publish this
here. It is the entry with keyword X-RZG-FWD-BY.
The complete entry was
X-RZG-FWD-BY:
anything@edv.abmayr.de
Anybody had
sent a mail to anything@edv.abmayr.de.
This address does not exist, as there should be a hyphen between edv und abmayr instead of a point. After some minutes the sender received a
mail from the mailserver which told him that the mail could not be delivered to
abmayr@any-university.de. (Yes, this
is a quite different address than I had entered.) This mail from the mailserver
contained the original mail of the sender as an attachment. And the header of
that attached mail contained the above entry. So, the first meaning of the
entry seems to be: address of receiver is illegal, may be misspelt or out of
date.
Analyzing
the problem I found another point: If a mail cannot be delivered, the
mailserver tries to send it to another address which is similar to the original
(bad) one. In one case the mailserver sent it to another address at edv-abmayr.de (with hyphen) and I
received it there. In another case the mailserver sent it to a no longer valid
address that contained the name abmayr
and belonged to my uncle. So, the second meaning of the keyword (FWD = forward)
could be that the undeliverable mail was forwarded to any other similar address
which is known by the mailserver for any reason.
BTW: Do you
think, this automated forwarding by the mailserver is OK? If you mistype the
address of the receiver, anybody else could get your mail !
The mail
mentioned above contained a further entry:
X-RZG-CLASS-ID:
mi
This seems
to be a classification of the reason why the mail could not be delivered and /
or was forwarded.
Author: Bernhard
Abmayr, www.edv-abmayr.de, version of
November , 24th, 2011