Do I view full email headers in Gmail?
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for
Askleo.com.
Hey, speaking of email, before we get started,
if you're not signed up to my Confident Computing weekly email newsletter?
Sign up today.
Every week I send out tips, tricks, and answers like this one on Tuesdays.
Here's a question that I get from time to time, actually.
I'm trying to figure out an email problem and the ISP support said I needed to send
them the full email headers of the message.
Huh? What's that?
And how do I get it?
I use Gmail.
What's interesting about email is
that there is a lot more to your messages than meets the eyes.
What your ISP is asking for, something I've asked people for as well
from time to time, the full headers are a bunch
of administrative information that actually accompanied your
message but is not normally displayed to you as you read your message.
Honestly, it's so much tech gobbledygook
and it would really just be distracting and confusing and would take you away
from the message that you're actually looking at.
On the other hand, sometimes it actually does have some valuable information.
And that's why when debugging an email
problem, ISPs, ESPs and others may very well ask
you to provide that full header information.
Let's head over to Gmail and I will show you exactly how to do that.
So here we are in Gmail.
I have this wonderful test email I'm looking at.
It's got a body, a to, a from, all the good stuff that you recognize from email.
Over on the right-hand side, there's this ellipses,
the vertical ellipses, and you can see it says more if I hover the mouse over it.
If I click on that, there is something here called Show Original.
That's what we're looking for.
It's the original message.
So if I click on that, I get this, honestly, a bizarre looking page.
There are two things to note here.
The upper half is not the full headers.
These are highlighted headers.
These are specific pieces of information that are commonly used to diagnose or look
at email problems, but it's not the full list.
That's the bottom part.
Now, one of the interesting things about
the bottom part is that it actually does include the entire message.
And you can see, I promised you this was going to be a geeky mess, and it is.
There's a ton of information here that you never, ever need to see or understand.
But getting it to your support representative
or whomever, there are a couple of different ways to do that.
One is downloading the original.
That's one of the ways to do this.
What that will do is it will download the entire message to your computer.
I'm going to go ahead and hit Keep,
and it has now saved it as a file on my computer.
We'll open that file in just a minute to show you what's inside.
But if somebody's asking you for full
headers, that would be one of the things you could do.
You could send them this full message.
Now, to be clear, this is the entire message, not just the headers.
We'll look at what that means in just a moment, but I want to be clear that if
you do nothing beyond this point and just send them this.
E ml file, you're sending them both the header
and the entire message that happened to go along with it.
The other approach, of course, is to copy the clipboard, which does exactly that.
It just copied it to clipboard. Great.
It's in the clipboard.
Now what?
Fire up Notepad.
I will go ahead and do exactly that.
Now if I go to edit paste, boom, I've got everything.
Again, the entire message has been pasted into Notepad.
And you'll see that the entire message is just text.
It's something that is very easy to read.
It's probably not easy to understand,
but it is easy to read and something that you could then give to someone else.
You would save this as a text file
and send it to whoever's helping you diagnose an email problem.
If you wanted to get rid of the body,
in other words, if you don't want to send anything more than just the headers,
what you do is you scroll down until you find a blank line.
There it is right there.
By definition, a blank line is the end of the headers.
What follows the blank line is actually
the body of the message, the message itself.
So if you only wanted to include
the headers, say there was something in the body that you didn't want to share
with whomever is helping you, then you could simply select all that,
hit delete, and now all we have are the headers that are associated with that.
Now, I promised you we would also take a look at the.
Eml file.
I'm going to go ahead and minimize all this.
This time we're going to fire up Windows File Explorer,
go over to my Downloads folder because that's where it ended up getting placed.
This is a test email, email file.
It's been given the name based on the subject of the email message.
Now, I can double click on this and it will open the email message.
Not very helpful if you want to actually see the contents of the file.
But as we saw earlier, it's a text file.
So once again, I'm going to run Notepad.
This time I'm going to go File, Open.
Again, in the Downloads folder, I'm going to change this from Texted
documents to all files, and then we will open this is a test email email file.
Boom.
There we can see the full message once again.
And like I said before, if you need to delete the body,
then go down to the first blank line and delete everything after that.
But now you know how to find the email
headers in Gmail, and hopefully you'll get your email
problems resolved with the help of whomever is helping you.
For updates, for comments,
for links related to this topic and more, visit
Askleo.com/5313.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com.
Thanks for watching.