How to Analyze Outlook Email Headers (Internet Headers)? – A Comprehensive Guide
Summary: This blog will help you become more aware and secure by teaching you how to analyze email headers in Microsoft Outlook. By learning to interpret internet headers, you can trace the origin of suspicious emails and protect yourself from phishing or spam. The article outlines two effective methods for header analysis within Outlook. While both are useful, using a dedicated tool like PST File Viewer offers a smoother and more detailed experience for examining email headers with precision.
Did you know that emails contain more than just the visible message content? Behind every email lies a hidden section known as the email header, which stores valuable metadata about the message’s journey, from the sender to your inbox. For professionals who deal with email management, cybersecurity, or troubleshooting, understanding email headers is a powerful skill.
Email headers reveal critical information such as the sender’s IP address, mail server path, authentication details, and timestamps. Analyzing these headers can help you verify the authenticity of messages, identify potential phishing attempts, or simply track where an email originated.
In this article, you’ll learn how to analyze email headers in Microsoft Outlook using two effective methods. But first, let’s briefly understand what an email header actually is.
What is an Email Header?
An email header is a hidden section of every email that contains the technical details of its transmission. While the average user never sees it, the header plays a crucial role in how the email is sent, routed, and delivered.
It includes information such as the sender and recipient’s email addresses, the mail servers the message passed through, the date and time stamps, and any authentication mechanisms applied. This data can help determine whether the message is legitimate, delayed, or tampered with.
An email typically consists of three key components:
- Message Body – The visible content of the email that you read.
- Envelope – Information used by mail servers to deliver the email, including sender and recipient addresses.
- Email Header – The hidden portion containing metadata about the message’s origin, path, and authenticity.
Before we show you how to view email headers in Outlook, let’s take a closer look at what kind of information email headers actually contain.
Important Parts to Analyze in an Outlook Email Header
An email header contains far more than just the sender, recipient, and subject line. While those elements are the most visible, a full header reveals detailed technical information that can help trace the path of an email, verify its authenticity, or identify potential security risks.
To make sense of an Outlook email header, it’s important to understand its standard components first.
Standard Parts of an Email Header:
- From: Shows the name and email address of the sender.
- To: Displays the name and email address of the intended recipient.
- Date: Indicates the exact time and date the email was sent.
- Subject: A brief summary or title of the email content.
Additional Parts of the Email Header
Beyond the basic fields, email headers contain critical information that reveals the journey of the email and helps diagnose any delivery issues or errors. Understanding these can help you trace an email’s path and verify its authenticity.
Here are some important additional fields to look for:
- Return-Path: This specifies the address where delivery notifications and bounce-back messages are sent. It essentially tells you where undeliverable emails are returned.
- Authentication-Results: This shows the results of security checks like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. If the email passes these checks, it will show a “pass” status, confirming the sender’s identity.
- Received: Each mail server that handles the email adds a “Received” entry to the header, showing the route the email took from sender to recipient. If delivery issues arise, this section helps pinpoint where the problem occurred.
- Message-ID: This is a unique identifier assigned to every email when it is created. Think of it as the email’s fingerprint, ensuring every message is uniquely trackable.
- MIME-Version: Indicates the email uses Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME), which allows emails to contain different types of content like text, images, and attachments.
- Content-Type: Specifies the format of the email content. For example, text/plain means the email contains simple text, while text/html indicates the email has HTML formatting.
- Precedence: This optional header signals to email servers (like Gmail) that the email might be part of a bulk mailing. It helps manage how the message is filtered, often preventing it from being marked as spam.
Why Analyze Outlook Email Headers?
Email headers hold vital information about where an email originated, how it traveled, and what it contains. Understanding this data is crucial for several reasons:
- Trace Email Origins and Paths: Forensic experts and IT professionals use headers to track the exact route an email took across different servers, helping to reconstruct its journey from sender to recipient.
- Detect Spam and Spoofing: By analyzing headers, it’s possible to spot fake sender details or unusual routing patterns that indicate spam, phishing, or spoofing attempts.
- Identify Abnormalities and Threats: Any inconsistencies in sender information or authentication results can signal potential security risks, allowing early detection of malicious emails.
- Ensure Compliance in Email Campaigns: Organizations review headers to verify that marketing or bulk emails meet legal and ethical standards before sending.
- Spot Malicious Activities: Sudden or suspicious changes in header data often serve as red flags for cyberattacks or unauthorized message alterations.
Manual Technique to Analyze Outlook Message Header
Microsoft Outlook is a popular email client, and knowing how to view Internet message headers can help you keep your inbox secure. Follow these simple steps to access email headers in Outlook:
- Open Microsoft Outlook on your computer.
- Select the email whose header you want to analyze.
- Click on File in the menu bar, then select Properties.
- In the Properties window, you will see the Internet headers section displaying the full email header.
Limitations of the Manual Outlook Method:
- You can only analyze headers one email at a time; there’s no bulk analysis option.
- If Outlook isn’t functioning properly, you won’t be able to access headers.
- This method is specific to Outlook and won’t work for other email clients like Thunderbird, Yahoo Mail, or Apple Mail.
Professional Method to Analyze Outlook Email Headers
Using a specialized tool like CubexSoft Free PST Viewer provides an efficient way to analyze Outlook email headers without needing Microsoft Outlook installed. This software handles large PST files without any size restrictions and extracts crucial email details such as sender, recipient, subject, and date for easy examination. It supports both ANSI and Unicode PST file formats and works seamlessly with all Outlook versions. Additionally, the PST Viewer is compatible with a wide range of Windows operating systems, including the latest Windows 11, making it a reliable choice for thorough email header analysis.
Conclusion
As highlighted in this blog, it’s always wise to check the email header before opening any message from an unfamiliar sender. We’ve discussed how to analyze Outlook email headers and explained that the process varies depending on the email client you use. For a seamless and independent solution, the CubexSoft Outlook Converter offers an effective way to examine email headers without relying on Outlook or other clients. Moreover, through this software, you can easily and quickly convert Outlook PST files to PDF, MBOX, EML, MSG, DOC, CSV, VCF, Thunderbird, OLM, Office 365, Gmail, Outlook.com, and many more. You can also try out the free version of this tool to experience its capabilities firsthand.
