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I am a privacy freak and I use a lot email aliases. I never sent my true email address to many online businesses and organisations and I try to keep the different identities well separated. But some time ago I started using Kmail as my email client until I found out that it automatically adds to the email a X header with the primary identity. So if I send an email from an alias it adds:

X-Kmail-transport-name: {$SERVICE_PROVIDER} ({$REAL_EMAIL_ACCOUNT})

Are the X headers going to be stripped by the email server before sending the email to the destination or will they be forwarded? Was my real email account leaked to the receiver?

FluidCode
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1 Answers1

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Generally, all headers are preserved through SMTP delivery – no filtering is done.¹

The X- prefix merely indicates that this is a non-standard header (a common practice to avoid squatting on names that might be used for future standardization), but it has no effect on whether that header will be preserved or not.

¹ (Only Bcc might be kind of an exception, but even that is expected to be removed – or not added in the first place – by the sending client, it's not filtered by mail servers beyond that point.)

u1686_grawity
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