Providing Full Headers

Sometimes, when troubleshooting a mail delivery problem, we may ask you to provide the "full headers" of an email message. Emails have a "body" section with the actual text of the message, and a header section with information such at the subject, from address and send date. Your email program will typically only show you a few of these headers, but many more are hidden, and may be useful.

When you simply "forward" a message, your email client will typically include only a small subset of the headers, and often not the one's we in which we are most interested. If your email client has a "forward as attachment" option, that will generally include everything. Otherwise, displaying these headers is different in different email clients.

Show Full Headers in Outlook

  1. Double-click the message for which you want to view full internet headers.
  2. Click on Options in Outlook 2007 or Tags in Outlook 2010/2013
  3. This will bring up the Message Options or Message Properties dialog box. The full headers are displayed in the Internet headers field at the bottom. Outlook Message Properties
  4. You can copy the headers and paste them into a new email.

Show Full Headers in Apple Mail.app

  1. Double-click the message for which you want to view full internet headers.
  2. Go to the Message menu and select Forward as attachement.
  3. Alternately, you can go to the View menu and select Message and then either All Headers or Raw Source. You can copy and paste the headers into a new message.

Show Full Headers in Thunderbird

  1. Double-click the message for which you want to view full internet headers.
  2. Go to the Message menu and select Forward as and then Attachement.
  3. Alternately, you can go to the View menu and select Message Source. You can copy and paste the headers into a new message.