Viewing message headers in Gmail

Viewing the full email message header for an email that you've received will reveal the path the message has taken through various servers from the sender to the recipient, i.e., you. You can see the intervening mail transfer agents between you and the sender. Often an email message that goes from the sender to the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) of his or her ISP is passed from that server to another server that may analyze the message before sending it on to a server handling recipients' email. E.g., the email message might next go to an antivirus server to scan it for malware. If you are receiving email at a Goole Gmail account you can view a message header, at least as of June 3, 2016, by selecting the message to view it and then clicking on the downward pointing arrow head you will see near the top of the message to the right of the date for the message as shown below:

Gmail drop down list

Select "Show original" from that list, which will open another tab in your browser displaying the all of the header lines for the message. E.g., you might see something similar to the following:

Received: by 10.100.215.3 with SMTP id n3cs646961ang;
        Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:00:50 -0700 (PDT)
Received: by 10.70.38.12 with SMTP id l12mr67416wxl.9.1216821648827;
        Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:00:48 -0700 (PDT)
Return-Path: <mo@example.com>
Received: from cluster1.echolabs.net (smtp-out.echolabs.net [216.52.118.200])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id h11si4850760wxd.24.2008.07.23.07.00.47;
        Wed, 23 Jul 2008 07:00:48 -0700 (PDT)
Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: 216.52.118.200 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of mo@example.com) client-ip=216.52.118.200;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: 216.52.118.200 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of mo@example.com) smtp.mail=mo@example.com
Received: from [10.10.10.106] (HELO mx01.echolabs.net)
  by bl-107.cluster1.echolabs.net (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.1.14)
  with ESMTP id 30865795 for example123450@gmail.com; Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:00:47 -0400
Return-Path: <mo@example.com>

 

 

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