How to find an email's full headers

If we've asked you for an email's full headers, this is how to find them.

Headers are the hidden part of every message. They record which servers handled it, whether it passed authentication, and what the receiving provider made of it. When a newsletter lands in spam, they're the difference between us guessing and us knowing.

Which copy of the email we need

Headers describe one specific message, so they only help if they come from the message that had the problem.

Ghost sends your newsletter, so the only copy with useful headers is the one that arrived in someone's inbox. If you subscribe to your own newsletter, that's the one to open. Otherwise ask a subscriber who saw it land in spam. The steps below work the same way in their inbox.

A fresh test email isn't a substitute. Test sends go out with link tracking switched off, so they aren't quite the message your subscribers received.

Don't forward it the normal way

Forwarding an email wraps it in a new message with new headers of its own, so what reaches us describes your forward instead of the send we're trying to diagnose.

Two ways around that:

• Copy the text. Every client below can show you the raw message. Copy it and paste it into your reply.
• Attach the original. In Gmail, open the email, click the three dots next to Reply, then Forward as attachment. Most other clients have the same option under a similar name. That sends the message as a file with its headers intact.

If you're pasting text, we need everything from the top down to the first blank line. That blank line is where the headers stop and the email itself starts. Sending more than that is never a problem.

Where to find the raw message

• Gmail: open the email, click the three dots next to Reply, then Show original.
• Outlook on the web, and the new Outlook for Windows and Mac: open the email, click More actions (the three dots), then View → View message details.
• Classic Outlook for Windows: double-click the email so it opens in its own window, then File → Properties. The headers are in the Internet headers box.
• Apple Mail on a Mac: View → Message → Raw Source, or press ⌥⌘U.
• Yahoo Mail: open the email, click the More options icon, then View Raw Message.
• Proton Mail: open the email, click More (the three dots), then View headers. Download saves them as a text file.
• Thunderbird: press Ctrl+U, or ⌘U on a Mac. View → Headers → All shows them above the message instead.

On a phone you mostly can't. Neither the Gmail app nor Mail on iPhone and iPad will show you the raw message. Proton Mail's app is the exception, under the same three-dot menu. For everything else, open the email on a computer.

What you can read yourself

Gmail does most of the work for you here. The Show original page opens with a summary listing SPF, DKIM and DMARC, each marked PASS or FAIL for that exact message.

If all three pass, your authentication is fine and the cause is somewhere else: your domain's reputation, your list, or what's in the email. If one fails, that's the thread to pull.

In any other client, look for the Authentication-Results header near the top. It says the same thing in one line:

Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
       dkim=pass header.i=@send.example.com;
       spf=pass (google.com: domain of bounce@send.example.com
       designates 203.0.113.10 as permitted sender);
       dmarc=pass (p=NONE sp=NONE dis=NONE) header.from=example.com

The other line worth finding is Message-ID, a unique string for that one email. It's what lets us trace the message through our sending provider and read back what the receiving server actually said about it.

What to send us

The headers, plus three things that save a round trip:

• the recipient's domain, so gmail.com, outlook.com, or a subscriber's company domain
• roughly when it was sent
• whether it went to spam for one subscriber or for a lot of them

Send it to help@magicpages.co. Gmail's Copy to clipboard button is the quickest way to get the text across, and Download Original saves the whole message as a .eml file you can attach.

Headers include the recipient's address, the subject line, and every server the message passed through. There's nothing in there from your Ghost admin and no passwords. If you'd rather not send us the body of the email, the header block on its own is enough to work with.

If you haven't been through the usual causes yet, that's the better place to start:

My Email Newsletters Land in Spam

It’s almost never your DNS. When your newsletters go out through us, an unverified sending domain and a mismatched sender are both prevented — which leaves your domain’s reputation, your list, and your content.

Magic PagesJannis Fedoruk-Betschki