Author: Dave Lewis

I was recently doing some work with the Toronto police and I came across an aspect of email that I have always taken for granted. Email headers are something that I have taken as obvious until I looked at it from the perspective of a non-technical person. If you have received an email from persons unknown and you need to find out where it came from the full headers would provide a great deal of information.

From a Mindspring help article on how to interpret email headers:

Tracing the edges of your email, hiding from untrained eyes, are the fingerprints of Simple Mail Transfer Protocol … the headers. Email headers contain quite a bit of information about a message that is not apparent at first glance. I can’t guarantee that you’ll be in there with the experts, but if you would like to learn a little more about where your email has been, and who really sent it, allow me to show you the basics of what your email headers may contain.

To see all message headers for Microsoft Outlook Express:

-Double click to display the message in its own window.
-Select File menu and select Properties.
-Click the Details tab to view the entire header.
-Cut and paste the header.

You can also view the entire message (headers and contents) with the “Ctrl-F3″ shortcut.

Microsoft Outlook 2003

Outlook (not to be confused with Outlook Express) is part of the Microsoft Office suite and therefore a popular mailer. To see message headers:

-Double click to display the message in its own window.
-Go to the View menu and select Options.
-Right click in the Internet Headers box and choose Select All.
-Right click again in the Internet Headers box and choose Copy.

Mozilla Thunderbird

Thunderbird is popular email client available for Mac, Windows on Linux systems and sometimes installed to replace vendor tools on other platforms. To see verbose headers:

-Select View menu and select Headers and then All.

Mail.app

This email client for Mac comes with OS X. In order to view headers in a Mail.app message:

-Select View -> Message -> Raw Source and this will show you the complete header information.

Visualware has a demo that will allow you to paste in header information and it will do the interpretation for you. But, be aware that there is no expectation of privacy to be had if you use this tool.

Tags: Email Clients, Email Headers, View Headers