Get Headers – Hotmail Email Headers

Email Headers Overview: Applies to Hotmail and all others.

Emails are made up of two parts, the message header and the message body. The message body contains the content of the message while the message header contains the control information which is commonly made up of several fields. If you get header information from an email, you will commonly see the following fields. First, contained in the email header is the ‘From:’ field which displays the senders email address and possibly their name as well. Then it is the ‘To:’ field which contains the email address(es) and name(s) of the recipient(s). Getting the email headers to display will also reward you with the ‘Subject:’, ‘Date’, ‘Message-ID’, ‘Bcc:’, ‘Cc:’, ‘Content-Type:’, ‘In-Reply-To: (Message-ID)’, ‘Reply-To:’, and ‘Sender:’. If you are able to get header information from your emails you can discover more information in regard to who (or what) emailed you the message. Getting header information is useful to discover spam prior to replying to it.

Why get header information for Hotmail Emails

This is a reasonable question. After all, in today’s day in age, we have tons of features that automatically detect spam and deal with it accordingly. However, there are some circumstances in which getting this information is still useful. So, why get header information for Hotmail emails? While the average Joe may be able to easily disregard or identify suspected spam, that is not always as easy for others. I run a small Web Design business for which I advertise on Craigslist. If you are not familiar with Craigslist, listings are free. Although this is nice, it also makes it a haven for spammers to collect targeted email addresses. If I post an ad for Web Design and use my email address rather then the email obfuscation service offered by Craigslist, my email address will be collected by bots searching for Web Design associated email addresses and used for spam. If I use the email obfuscation service, it is more difficult for spammers to get my email address. The have to send an email to me that would entice a reply. Then, when I reply to the original email, my email address will be visible to them and added to the spam list. The problem here is that I am obligated to reply to customers (or possible customers) in order to get work. If I falsely identify an email as spam, I may be losing business.

One technique I use to identify this type of spam is the lack of effort on the part of the spammer. I’ve found that most spam emails are short, two-four line messages which are very bland and leave out pertinent information. Also, for some reason, the senders name is not capitalized in most cases.

Have you ever had an email come in with the ‘To:’ field being blank? If you get header information from the email you will be able to retrieve this information.

How to get header information for Hotmail Emails

To see the headers in Windows Live Hotmail:

- Right-click the message in the message list, and then click ‘View message source’.

Easy, wasn’t it?