Viewing Full Headers
From DreamHost
Viewing your message headers is like looking at the map that your email takes when being delivered to your mailbox. Understandably this map is very helpful in finding out the causes for many email problems that can be experienced on any system. From delayed mail to email bounces, headers are the number one clue in troubleshooting.
View and Understand your Message Headers
By default, mail clients will only show you the basic headers of a message:
From: spaceman@spacemannotonearth.com Subject: Been to space lately? Date: March 20, 2020 4:50:09 PM PDT To: earthman@onthisworld.com Reply-To: spaceman@spacemannotonearth.com
This information is useful, but it is not all the information that you actually have access to. In your mail client, you can select a message then choose to view the messages full headers or some even call it long headers:
From: spaceman@spacemannotonearth.com Subject: Been to space lately? Date: March 20, 2020 4:50:09 PM PDT To: earthman@onthisworld.com Reply-To: spaceman@spacemannotonearth.com Return-Path: spaceman@spacemannotonearth.com X-Original-To: earthman@onthisworld.com Delivered-To: earthman@onthisworld.com Received: from relayserver3.somehost.com [123.123.123.123]) by mail.onthisworld.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id E7AED43549; Tue, 20 Mar 2020 16:50:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from relayserver2.somehost.com [66.66.66.66]) by relayserver3.somehost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 74146BD416; Tue, 20 Mar 2020 16:50:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: by relayserver1.somehost.com [88.88.88.88] (Postfix) id 70A6D6358B; Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:50:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp.spacemannotonearth.com [233.233.233.233] by relayserver1.somehost.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 63A3663589 for <earthman@onthisworld.com>; Tue, 20 Mar 2020 16:50:10 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [233.233.233.43] (isp.spacemannotonearth.com [233.233.233.12]) by smtp.spacemannotonearth.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id A4EC7912A8 for <earthman@onthisowrld.com>; Tue, 20 Mar 2020 16:50:10 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <46007331.1050908@onthisworld.com> User-Agent: Thunderbird 12.5.0.10 (Windows/20200221) Mime-Version: 20.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
This information has kind of an odd trait. You must read it from the bottom up to see the path of the message. So the first line shows us his internet connection and router sending the message to his smtp server. Then the smtp server routes the mail to the final location of mail.onthisworld.com. If just looking at this gives you a headache, pass it along to support as this will soon be required information for all email related problems dealing with delayed or bounced messages.
Your headers may not look exactly like the above created example, but it will have all the basic infomation. It will have Received by and Received from information as well as letting us know what servers and the date and time of the delivery from each server. It will also show you the timezone the servers it passes through are using.
