Analyze email headers

Hello,

There are a few ways to have a look at email headers. Some of them require some knowledge, some others are quite visual. Let’s see a few here.

Get headers

From Outlook, select an email, then click “properties”.

The actual headers will be located in the “internet headers” at the bottom of the window. This is raw headers, you can read it like that if you understand the structure, or, you can use a tool to help you visualize more easily.

The headers will tell you which email servers, anti-spam gateway, relay your email went through during his journey from your corespondent, it will also tell you the Spam Confidence Level and other useful information that can help when troubleshooting email delivery, and email routing.

Tooling

There are a lot of tooling available online, hereunder my favorites. This is not an exhaustive list, just the one I used over the years.

• Microsoft Connectivity analyzer
  • Microsoft’s one.
• MXToolbox
  • Third party one, but quite good and performant.
  • Provide a link to share with other people
• Message Header Analyzer
  • The Outlook add-in I want to focus on today.

Message Header Analyzer add-in

MHA is an Outlook add-in, you need to add it to our Outlook. To do so, click on “Get add-ins” in the ribbon

Search “Message Header Analyzer”, and then add it.

Then, select an email, click on the “MHA” icon from the ribbon, it will display the headers in a nice formatted format:

Now you good to go, you’re now able to analyze email headers without leaving Outlook.

Note: As you can see at the bottom of the first tab, you can also display the “original headers” if you want raw data to share with someone.