Email Metadata~ology

1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?

Cartoons by Andertoons

Without looking at any expanded Header information I can see quite a lot of information about the users email.

• Name of the sender – this could be either the senders name or a business name. It could also be any text the sender chooses.

• Date and time the message was sent – this information converts to my date and time and not the senders. Useful if you have someone emailing you from another country or timezone. You can see when they hit the send button and whether the pressure’s on to reply back! i.e. 5mins ago, last night at 10pm...

• Subject: what the email is about – sometimes I rely on the Subject line to help me filter or manually scan my inbox which gets many messages. It’s not helpful to me if a subject line is empty or not meaningful, grrr.

• Level of priority – the sender can effectively ‘tag’ the message they are sending by importance such as High, Normal or Low. This tells me what the sender thinks about the message content; it implies how I should regard the message. Sometimes this is used by the sender in a different way I would not expect. They mark their email as Important when it contains a couple of pictures of their Waterworld holiday. THEY are important to me but the message content is not urgent or what I would call High priority.

• Senders email address – it’s often a good idea to quickly check if the email is really from the person you know. You can also see what organisation or ISP the sender is using in the domain after the @ symbol. This is not a fool-proof method of checking authenticity as spammers usually forge this information but it is a quick check which can be followed by an extended header analysis if necessary --> Get.a.Geek.to.Explain. or have a look at this explanation of basic and extended email headers.

• Carbon Copy recipients – If the sender has chosen to send the same email I received from them to other people, I can see their names or email addresses in the CC field. I am always unsettled by CC emails and I think it’s because my own email address/name could be displayed to people I don’t know. I feel like I’ve lost control of my privacy and security. Maybe I’m being paranoid...

• My email address – this is shown exactly the way in which the sender has chosen; it could be my full email address or a ‘label’ like ‘The Queer Queen’ or my name. If I am in the users Contact List, my name or label would display by default instead of my email address but I think that depends on the email software being used.
  

It's so important to learn the basics of how to send email and to be aware of how to reply to email messages in the right manner. I class myself as a seasoned email user in that I have seen and made some email bloopers in the past and I’ve felt the consequences of sending ‘the wrong/inappropriate reply’ without thinking. 

Ignoring the human side of email messaging by not considering, relating to or just plain being aware of the other persons context can be truly ignorant and in todays wired world, I think it’s quite a responsibility we have as communicators.