spcnvdr/tracemail

A simple Python e-mail header analyzer

Tracemail - A small e-mail header analyzer

Description

Tracemail is a small, Python 3.X.X script to print information about an e-mail. Tracemail analyzes the headers of an e-mail and prints information, such as the route the e-mail took, time per hop, etc. This script was created to provide a simple program for analyzing e-mail headers with as few dependencies as possible. This program takes one or more e-mails in plain text format as input. Simply copy the source of an email, including the headers, and paste it into a plain text file to use as input for the program.

Note that this script requires a Python module named python-dateutil. It may be a good idea to create a virtual environment using Venv to manage dependencies without polluting the system packages

Getting Started

Get a copy of the source code and change into the tracemail directory.

git clone https://github.com/spcnvdr/tracemail.git

cd tracemail

Then install any required packages. The goal was to use only the Python standard library, but the python-dateutils package made life a lot easier when parsing date strings

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Then run the program with the -h or --help options for help.

./tracemail -h

An example of using tracemail to display some basic information about an e-mail, simply supply an e-mail file with no arguments

./tracemail ./email.txt

To display information about the route an e-mail took, use the -r option.

./tracemail -r ./email.txt

Multiple e-mails can be specified at once to process multiple e-mails.

./tracemail ./email1.txt ./email2.txt ./email3.txt

To Do

• Add an option to print the location of an IP address using GeoIP
• Parse and display authentication information
• Add info about how to view e-mail headers in different mail clients

Contributing

Pull requests, new feature suggestions, and bug reports/issues are welcome.

License

This project is licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License also known as the "New BSD License" or the "Modified BSD License". A copy of the license can be found in the LICENSE file. A copy can also be found at the Open Source Institute