Phishing and other email scams are on the rise. One of the best ways to identify fraudulent emails is to examine the email header for detailed information about the sender.. Next, We tell you how to do it in Outlook.
Outlook itself provides a basic view of email headers. If that's not enough, there is a free plugin that breaks down the headers to give you a more human friendly view. We will also cover that.
Basic Outlook header view
To get a basic view of email headers, open the email in Outlook and click File> Properties.
In the Properties window that opens, the header is displayed in the text box “Internet headers” on the bottom.
This text box is not very large, so we suggest you select all the text and copy it into the text editor of your choice to make it more visible.
Despite this, header information is one big block of text, that is not so simple to read, especially if you don't read the headlines very often. For a more useful view, there is a free plugin you can use.
Using the Message Header Analyzer Plugin
If you have never installed an add-in in Outlook, we have already written about the procedure before. The installation procedure is quite simple and the plugins are validated by Microsoft, so they are safe to use.
And if you install the plugin on the desktop client, how we will show you, Additionally the add-in will be automatically added to the Outlook web app. This also makes it possible for you to use it when you are connected to Outlook in a browser..
To start, open Outlook and click Start> Get Add-ins.
In the search box at the top right, start writing “message header” and select the add-in “Message header parser”.
Click the Add button to install the plugin.
Once the plugin has been installed, the add button will change to say “Aggregate”. Click on the “X” at the top right to close the window.
When you have selected an email in Outlook, the button “See headings” will now be visible in the menu bar.
Click this button to view the email headers of the selected email. The plugin has the following tabs:
- Summary: Information (this is the default tab when you open the plugin).
- He received: Information about where the message was received and when.
- Antispam: Microsoft Exchange Online Protection email antispam scan information.
- Other: All other items in the header are divided into individual blocks.
The best of all is that, when there are suitable web pages that relate to an element, Message Header Analyzer includes a link to that page. This includes links to the exact section in the email specification, What Authentication results—And Microsoft's information on the anti-spam elements are added to emails that go through Exchange.
