We have heard of Email subject, Email sender, Email attachment, but what is an Email header? Email header is a part of your Email message but is not displayed in along with the email message. This information stays hidden somewhere in the properties of every email message and contains information regarding the details of the sender, the time, the date, the routing details, the server details, and much more. A normal user might find interest in reading these details but for security reasons people might wish to know these details for tracking the origin of any email which they receive.
All the versions till Outlook 2007 displayed this information under the properties page of the Email. You have not seen such information even in these old versions then let me state that this information can be accessed by right clicking on any email and then selecting Message Option from the context menu. In the Message Options windows you will find a box at the bottom titled “Internet Headers” and this is the place which will give you all the details mentioned above. The information given in Outlook 2010 remains the same but the way to access this information is different than any other previous version. To access the mail header in outlook 2007 you need to double click the mail to open it in a separate window. When the mail opens, click on the File menu and then click on Info. The Info section will give you some addition options for performing tasks like setting the permissions, moving the mail to a specified folder, to resend or recall the mail, or to view its properties. Since we are here to view the headers of the mail so we will click on Properties in the Info section and this bring the same old style Properties box. In this box we can view the email headers at the same place which is at the bottom titled Internet Headers. The Properties box and the information and options given in it are the same as in the Properties box of earlier Outlook version but the only difference is the way to open this Properties window.
A sample of Email header to know it looks like is given below:
Return-Path:<bogdan@fx.ro>
Received: from srv01.advenzia.com(root@localhost)
By emailaddressmanager.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id i2OApw
For support@emailaddressmanager.com; Mon, 2 Aug 2010 10:00 PST
X-ClientAddr:192.168.1.1
Received: from abc.fx.ro
By srv01.advenzia.com(root@localhost)
For support@emailaddressmanager.com; Mon, 2 Aug 2010 10:00 PST
Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:00 PST
Message-ID: <200432468234626381286786182@mail.fx.ro>
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: support@emailaddressmanager.com
Subject: test mail for reading email headers
From: bogdan@fx.ro
Reply-To: bogdan@fx.ro
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Originating-IP: 80.81.82.83
X-Mailer: FX Webmail webmailer FX RO
X-RAVMilter-Version: 8.3.3 (Snapshot 1239712398)(Mail)
Status: delivered
Given above is a sample email header and you can see something of this type in every emails properties. Using this you can find the location of the person who sent you the email. This can easily be done by knowing the IP address and then looking it up in any IP address lookup website.
Thanks Anurag.
What should we be looking for when we have had our email address ‘used’ by a spammer and the email comes back to us as rejected?
Can we identify who is misusing our email address from the header?
Thanks.
I can’t get it to work in 2010. I can view source but it doesn’t show the path like in older versions of outlook. Any ideas?
I don’t understand why we cannot see e-mail headers in Outlook-2010 without making the changes in the settings of Microsoft Outlook. Anyways, thanks for this piece of information, though I find it quite difficult to plot the changes, yet I could do it in one attempt.
@Smith, you can know it by reading Receiving Tag of email headers. You can also track the IP of the sender by reading X-Originating-IP tag of email header.
Hope it will work for you.
What about an explanation to the common person that does not have degrees in computer jargon. Why does Microsoft hide the header in the first place? Just make it so we can see it. On this specific email when I click on source there are 242 lines. How about a hint?