Ubu nunc, Outlook email headers?

March 12, 2010 7:58 AM

OutlookFilter: where the heck are my message headers?

Please help me solve the mystery of the missing e-mail headers. I'm attempting to troubleshoot a problem senders from our domain are having with email deliveries to another domain and I need to get at header information. I'm on Windows 7. When I'm looking at messages in Outlook 2007, I open message options and see that there is a box labeled "Internet headers" where, presumably, the header information should appear. Instead, I see nothing. Just an empty box. For every. Single. Email. I. Look. At.

I've been trying to Google for a solution but I am coming up empty. WTF? How do I get at these freakin' email headers? Bonus points for any solutions that bypass Outlook entirely.

posted by trunk muffins to computers & internet (6 answers total)

I just checked on Outlook 2007 on Win 7. Open the message, right click and select view source.
posted by COD at 8:52 AM on March 12, 2010

The header info shows what's happened to the email already, if you are looking at sent messages it's not going to show anything because it hasn't made any hops yet. Either look at it from the Exchange side or, better yet, have the user in the other domain look at the headers when (if?) they arrive at the destination.
posted by 8dot3 at 9:37 AM on March 12, 2010

Yeah, that's the problem -- it's happening intermittently, and we don't have a good way of finding out whether the recipients have even received the emails. Exchange notifies the sender that "delivery could not be made in the time specified" but we don't get an outright failure or refusal message. Assume we can't access any email on the recipient side.

It looks like I can't view headers for anything that goes through Exchange. So I'm not sure why our Exchange admins passed this off to my department, but that's where I'm at.
posted by trunk muffins at 10:00 AM on March 12, 2010

If you're looking at the sent folder, I don't believe you're going to see headers. Those get added by the mail servers, and will only be visible at the destination.

Think of faxing a document. It doesn't add transmission info to your copy, just the one that arrives at the other end.
posted by zamboni at 12:11 PM on March 12, 2010

Which is to say, pass this back to your Exchange admin. Not your department.
posted by zamboni at 12:12 PM on March 12, 2010

Your Exchange Admins are fobbing you off with bullshit, probably because its Friday and they can't be arsed doing any work. Or at least, that's what usually happened to problems that came my way on a Friday when I was an Exchange Admin.

They already know this, but so they know that you know where they should be looking: Exchange System Manager has a tool called Message Tracking Center. If they're using Exchange to make a direct connection to your recipients mailing server, your Exchange Admins can use that tool to find out what is happening. They'll need at least the Originator and the rough date and time it was sent.

If they use a different front end, it too will have a log of connection attempts, but I would start with asking them to check the MTC.
posted by IanMorr at 12:29 PM on March 12, 2010