Gaia/Email/ProvidingEmailsForDebugging

So, you've been asked to provide an e-mail, or part of an e-mail for debugging purposes?

Protecting Your Privacy

There are several things you might be concerned about revealing about a message:

• Who sent it to you
• The account on which you received the message
• What they said
• What was said in an earlier reply in the message thread that has been quoted

Redacting this information may not be as easy as it seems. If you are not comfortable with sharing any of these pieces of information, the safest bet is to just not share the e-mail or any part of it. If you just don't want the e-mail to be seen by the world but are okay with a specific contributor or contributor(s) seeing, it's okay to send it directly to the contributor(s) rather than attaching the message to a bug.

The specific things that might not be obvious:

• Who sent it to you
  • While the 'from' header is the obvious place for this to show up, identifying information may be contained in 'Received' header lines, (in a harder-but-not-impossible-to-use) in computed hashes like a DKIM signature in the header, in quote descriptions ("so and so wrote on Monday:"), or just mentioned in the body of the message.
• The account on which you received the message
  • This is basically the same as the above
• What they said / what was said in an earlier reply
  • When looking at the source of the message, the body of the message may be encoded in base64, making it harder to redact part of the body of a message.
  • Some mail clients will collapse quoted passages from previous copies of the e-mail. This never hidden, but make sure you're aware of all of the content of the message.
  • Mail messages may include the body of a message twice. Once in HTML form, and once in a plaintext/non-HTML form.

If you feel confident about your ability to redact bits of the message, you can do that. Also, sometimes all that is really needed are specific pieces of the e-mail, usually to do with the message structure or specific header lines.

Forwarding a message without doing any redactions

Thunderbird

• Select the message you want to forward.
• Do you have a traditional menu bar?
  • No: Push that button with the icon that looks like 3 parallel lines, then do the yes case:
  • Yes: From the "Message" menu, select "Forward As...", then "Attachment".
• Your message is now attached as an .eml file to the message you are writing.

Zimbra Web UI

• Compose a new message.
• Press the drop-down arrow at the right end of the "Attach" (previously "Add attachment") button to bring up a list of attachment options.
• Choose the "Mail" option. This will bring up a 2-pane UI with a folder tree and a list of message in the currently displayed folder.
• Locate the message you want to forward, clicking on it and selecting the "Attach" button. (If you want to forward multiple messages, you can use the check-boxes.)

Other Web UIs

For most other webmail UIs like gmail and yahoo, there is no way to forward the message as an attachment. See the cases below about how to save a message to disk for redaction. You will want to save the message to disk then attach that file as an attachment.

Saving a message to disk (for redaction)

Doing this will provide you with the raw message file saved to disk, usually as an .eml file. You can edit this file with a text editor. It's okay to delete header lines (the lines that look like "Key: Value" at the top of the file) in general or to modify their values.

In the how-to's below I'll assume you just want to redact, but if you just want to copy and paste the relevant bits into a different text file, that's also fine.

Thunderbird

• Select the message
• Select the message you want to forward.
• Do you have a traditional menu bar?
  • No: Push that button with the icon that looks like 3 parallel lines, then select "Save As...", then "File".
  • Yes: From the "File" menu, pick "Save As...", then "File"
• Save the file somewhere
• (Edit the file with a text editor if you want to perform any redactions.)

Zimbra Web UI

• Select the message
• Look at the raw message. Either:
  • Right click on the message and choose 'show original' OR
  • Click on the 'actions' button and choose 'show original' from the drop-down
• A new tab/window will open up with the raw source of the message. Copy and paste the contents of the message to a text editor (notepad, gedit, vim, emacs). The key thing is that we don't want a Word document or a PDF with the contents of the e-mail in it. Just a text file. The extension doesn't matter but .eml is convention.
  • For copying and pasting, usually with something like: "control-a" to select all, then "control-c" to copy it works pretty wel.
• Perform any redactions you want to perform
• Save the file

GMail Web UI

• Display the conversation that contains the message you want
• Scroll to the message you want.
• In the upper right of the message in the conversation view, there should be a button with 2-segments; the main body of the button is a reply icon. To its right is a down arrow. Click on the down arrow to bring up a list of actions.
• Select "Show original"
• A new tab/window will open up with the raw source of the message. Copy and paste the contents of the message to a text editor (notepad, gedit, vim, emacs). The key thing is that we don't want a Word document or a PDF with the contents of the e-mail in it. Just a text file. The extension doesn't matter but .eml is convention.
  • For copying and pasting, usually with something like: "control-a" to select all, then "control-c" to copy it works pretty wel.
• Perform any redactions you want to perform
• Save the file

Yahoo Web UI

Yahoo does not let you get the entire source of the message, but it will let you see the headers. Unfortunately this is not good enough in general. But to get the headers you can right click on the message and choose "View Full Header" or access the same options from the "Actions" drop-down menu.

Outlook.com/Hotmail.com/mail.live.com UI

• Select the message in question in the three-pane UI. The message should be displayed in the preview pane.
• Click the big ellipsis ("...") button at the top of the web page in the menu. It will be to the right of the "Move to" and "Categories" buttons.
• Click on "view message source" in the pop-up menu that shows up. It should be at the bottom of the list.
• A new tab/window will open up with the raw source of the message. Copy and paste the contents of the message to a text editor (notepad, gedit, vim, emacs). The key thing is that we don't want a Word document or a PDF with the contents of the e-mail in it. Just a text file. The extension doesn't matter but .eml is convention.
  • For copying and pasting, usually with something like: "control-a" to select all, then "control-c" to copy it works pretty wel.
• If necessary, perform any redactions you want to perform
• Save the file