How do I view Email Headers in my Mail Client?

There are a number of different email clients, here’s the most popular and how to display email headers in that email client.

 

AOL Email

The email files are in an html format. The objective is to save the file in html format. This can be done as follows:

Open the email message you want to save, as if you were reading it – Near the top, at the bottom of the To: / From: section, click on “Details” to reveal the header. (you could simply copy and paste this information also) Move mouse cursor to the top tool bar, click on “File” Move mouse cursor to “Save as…” and click. Identify which directory you would like to save the file in. This is done using the normal save function of Windows. If you are not real comfortable with directories, save the file in “Desktop”. This will have the file icon visible on you regular desktop screen and very easy to find later on. Provide a name of the file in the “file name” box. Select the “type” as “html” if possible. If your browser does not show “html” type, just select the type as “All Files” and add “.html” to the file name generated in step 6, such as email.html. The “dot” before the html extension is important. The objective of this step is to have the extension of the file as an “html” type file. Press “Save”. To forward the file to someone else (law enforcement, lawyer, ISP):

Move cursor to the top tool bar and click on “Write” Insert the email address you want to forward the file to Type any info in the body of the message, if needed To add the html file you just generated in the above steps, click on “Attachments” When the “Attachments Window” opens, click on “Attach” Find the file in the directory window and highlight the file name. If you followed the “Desktop” instructions, the directory name is “c:desktop”. If there are too many files that appear, type “*.html” in the file name. The use of the asterisk (also called a star by some) lists all files that are html. Click on “open” Click on “OK” Click on “Send now” The message and attached file have now been sent. Please be aware that AOL only keeps messages in your INBOX for two weeks, unless you save it as NEW or save it in a separate folder in your AOL directory on your computer.

Additionally, a screen name of TOSEMAIL1 has been identified as a source of help for unacceptable email in the AOL system. Just enter tosemail1 in the “send to” screen. If you are outside of the AOL environment, the address is tosemail1@aol.com.

 

Compuserve

The default option is that full headers appear at the BOTTOM of each received message.

 

Eudora Pro

When reading an email message, look at the toolbar just above the message itself. There should be a button that reads BLAH BLAH BLAH in black and white. Click on this and the full headers will appear. Then select all, copy and paste into a new message to send to the offender’s ISP, or click on the forward button and the full headers will automatically be placed in the new email message.

 

Excite Webmail

View the message Use the “save to disk” option Open the message’s text file with your favorite text editor (notepad) Copy the message from the text editor

 

Free Agent/Agent

Click on MESSAGE, then “Show Full Headers.” Go to the message, click inside the message pane, COPY, then PASTE to a text file or forward the message to yourself or to the appropriate ISP.

 

Hotmail

Go to Options Go to Preferences Scroll down to Headers, then click on Advanced Headers

 

Juno Version 4+

On the drop down menu “Options”, choose “Email Options..” (press ctrl-E) Under “Show Message Headers”, select the “full” option. Click the OK button to save the setting. Juno version 4+ can display MIME and HTML email, but does not provide a way of Viewing the HTML Source for the message within Juno. To get the full source, including HTML codes: In the Juno mail client, click “file” and then “Save Message as Text File..” (ctrl-T). Give the file a name which you will remember (many people save temporary files to the desktop). Double-click on the resulting file.

 

Lotus Notes 4.6 (Win 9x client)

Open the properties box on the message (in the default installation of the Notes Client, it will be the first smart icon on the left, but you can also right-click on the document and choose properties from that menu) Choose the second tab on the properties box, which is a list of fields and their contents Scroll down to the field “$additionalheaders.” Select the contents of the field and hit Ctrl+C to copy them to your clipboard Open a new email message, put your cursor in the body of the message, and hit Ctrl+V to paste the headers there If Notes will not permit you to select the contents of the field, you’ll have to manually copy them to a new message – please be very careful in doing so.

 

Microsoft Exchange

To read (and copy) the header using Microsoft Exchange, do the following: Open the message in Exchange to view it. Choose “File,” then “Properties,” then “Internet.” The header will be visible and will be highlighted. Simply right click and copy it. Then paste on the front of the message and forward it to your abuse department.

 

Microsoft Internet Explorer

I just stumbled onto a way to attach the full header to a message. Choose “Properties” under “File”. Click on the “Details” tab. This will show the full header. Now right click and choose “Select All”. Right click again and choose “Copy”. Start a new message, right click again, and choose “Paste”. This will paste the entire header into this new (and temporary) message. Copy the header from the new message and paste it back onto the original. The paste command doesn’t work directly on the original message. This isn’t elegant, but it seems to work.

 

Microsoft Internet News

For those people who use Microsoft’s Internet News, simply (while viewing the message) click on File, Properties, then click on the Details tab. Sending complaints to root@someisp.com will also work. Some other addresses are support@, webmaster@, and newsmaster@

 

Microsoft Outlook 98, Outlook 2000, Outlook 2003

Open the message and select View, then Options from the drop-down menus. Near the bottom of the screen you’ll see a section titled INTERNET HEADERS. You can copy the headers and paste them into an email elsewhere to get them to the proper people.

 

Microsoft Outlook 2007

Double click on the email message so that it is open in its own window. Outlook 2007 uses a watered-down version of Word 2007 as the email editor and with it comes the new ribbon user interface. Thus, the “Options” feature is no longer under “View”, as with previous versions of Outlook, and takes some hunting to find it, but it is there. It is on the “Message” tab, in the “Options” block, which is the fourth block over. To the right of “Options”, there is a little button with an arrow in it. Click on it and you have the message options menu with the internet headers in the bottom section. Select this information and copy/paste it as needed.

If you don’t have the message yet open, which is better yet, and you wish to see the header, right click on the message in your inbox and choose “Message Options”. You will be looking at the headers at this point.

Microsoft Outlook 2010

Double click on the email message so it opens in its own window. Now click on “File”, then “Properties”.  The email header is found under the “Internet Headers” option.

 

 

Microsoft Outlook Express 5

There’s an even easier solution to expanding Microsoft’s Outlook Express 5 headers so that you can copy and paste it to another window:

Right click on the message and select Properties. Choose the Details tab and select the Message Source Button. Select All (CTRL + A) and Copy (CTRL + C). Close the Message Source window and the Properties window. Select New Mail and position your cursor in the body of the email. Paste (CTRL + V) the copied information. Send the email to the ISP where the SPAM/UCE originated from.

 

Additional Method

Here’s a tip to simplify the process of getting full headers when using Outlook Express 5 and Windows 98 (don’t know about other versions of OE)

Instead of selecting the message, right-clicking properties, clicking details, then message source, simply select the message and press Ctrl-F3. Then press Ctrl-A followed by Ctrl-C. (Ctrl-F3 takes care of all the steps necessary to get to the full header. Ctrl-A selects all the text and Ctrl-C copies it to the clipboard.)

Now start a new message or just forward the original message (which takes less time than opening a new one) to the originating ISP.

 

Mozilla Thunderbird

To read the email headers in the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, simply open the email. On the menu bar, go to View | Headers and select “All”. The headers are immediately displayed. The menu choices and the results are shown in this hyperlinked image.

 

Netscape Messenger

To read the email header in Netscape Messenger (the email reader supplied with Netscape communicator) press Ctrl-U. A new window will open with the full message including the complete header. To copy this to a email message press Ctrl-A to highlight the entire message then Ctrl-C to copy it. Open the email message you want to send. Using the mouse, place the cursor in the body of the message, select edit / paste as quoted, from the menu bar.

 

Netscape News

I found a simple way to view the headers of news spam in Netscape. Simply click View-> document source when you’re looking at the offending item. The full headers are then visible.

 

Newswatcher

If you want the full headers on Newswatcher, go to File, choose Preferences, and check the Show Article Headers box.

 

Operamail

Choose Options and enable [x] Show Message Headers in Body of Message

 

Pegasus

In Pegasus, just hit Ctrl-H (or the backspace key) while reading a message. You will see the full headers. Do this *before* hitting “F” (for Forward), and the full headers will be forwarded, too. (True for Pegasus 2.53, at least)

 

Pine

From the main Pine menu:

Type S for Setup then C for Config.

Use the space bar and down arrow to scroll until you reach the option [ ] enable-full-header-cmd, then type X in the box to toggle the option on. Type E to exit Config, and Y to save changes. The next time you read a message, type H and the full headers will be displayed at the top of the message. Type H again to hide the headers.

 

Unix

I think I’ve figured out one way of of getting the full headers on Unix. We received a spam and the message had just the usual “from,” “to,” “date,” “subject” headers. But when I saved the message in a directory, then used the “type” command or printed it out, full headers magically appeared, showing where they were really posting from.

 

WebTV

While viewing the email, hit “Forward” on the sidebar. Address the document to yourself. Completely erase the subject line. Put your cursor on the first line of the “body” (text area); Hit “Return” (enter) twice. Your cursor should now be on the 3rd line of the text area. Type any “Alt” character on this line; DO NOT HIT “RETURN” Cut and Paste the “Alt” character onto the subject line: (CMD+”A”), (CMD+”X”), (CMD +”V”) The “Alt” character should “jump” down to the message text-area. Hit “Send”; open the received mail.

 

mailx

Some more header info for some Unix mail programs. Nearly nobody uses mail and mailx any more, but they’re available on almost all UNIX systems, so let’s start with those. You can exit your current mail program without changing the mailbox and then look at the mail message using mail or mailx. Showing a mail message with the Print or P command displays all of the header lines. Note capital P — it’s important. Saving the current mail message with the saveretain command saves all of the header lines. (On some systems, Save or S — note the capitals! — does this too).

 

ELM

There are lots of other mail readers; the one I use is ELM. In ELM, you display the headers for the current message with the H command.