Wireshark · Wireshark-users: Re: [Wireshark-users] Retrieving email address from a wireshark capture

[M Holt <m.iostreams@xxxxxxxxx>]

My apologies, I have been tied up and haven't checked these emails for a bit.

In the situation you described below, the answer is most likely no.
Here is the problem, gmail is a webmail service.  You can configure it so that you can have it deliver mail to you, and if that were the case, you would be able to watch the smtp traffic.
However, most people don't do that, so you more than likely, your user is logging into the web page to read email.

As you referenced, one gmail user is sending to another gmail user - but both have just logged into the gmail webpage to read, compose, etc - nothing has been "sent".
So, the question becomes, can you sniff web traffic on your network and pull out a webmail address.

Well, the answer is again, most likely no.

The reason is because gmail is going to use SSL to encrypt the pages by default - you won't be able to see the web page payload.
There is an option in gmail to disable https, but if you have user that is not so savvy, they probably wouldn't be able to find the setting.
If the user IS savvy, then they probably wouldn't disable that setting ;)

I hope that helps and that it wasn't too late.

If you do ever need to just sniff normal smtp traffic, you might try a filter something like this:

smtp.req.parameter contains "FROM" || smtp.req.parameter contains "TO"

Best regards,

Mike

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Firdous Saleheen <saleheen.firdous@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Dear Mike,
Thanks for your prompt response.
Say, I have a router with SPAN port option, hence have the capability to capture a copy of all the traffic running through that router. Now I need to capture the email address in that traffic, its body is not important. Say, someone from the internet write an email from gmail to a user under my network who is also using the gmail address. Is it possible for me to capture the traffic and extract these two gmail addresses with the help of wireshark? If possible, can you please suggest specifically how can I do that with wireshark? Or if you have a better idea can you please share?

lots of thanks

Best Regards,
Saleheen


Hi,

It seems that would depend on how you are trying to capture the email
address...
Are you using Wireshark on your desktop, and trying to capture your own
email as it goes out?
Do you have a tap on a switch somewhere that is sniffing all traffic, and
you want to just pull email traffic only?
You could probably start by filtering known email ports - 25, 110, etc.
It really depends on where you are at within your topology, and what kind of
visibility you have to the email traffic passing through.

For example, you won't be able to pull email traffic out of a VPN tunnel by
just having a hub stuck on the network somewhere - does that help?

Mike

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 3:38 AM, Firdous Saleheen <
saleheen.firdous@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

 Hi,
 I am a newbee with wireshark. Does anyone know whether it is possible to
 retrieve email addresses  from a wireshark capture? If possible can anyone
 please let me know the method?

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,

*Firdous Saleheen*

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