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View Full Headers in Outlook for Mac

If you are having problems with your email, one common diagnostic aid is a complete list of the message's headers. Headers show the path a message took to get from the sender to the recipient. The IT Service Desk or other technical support may ask you to provide a message's headers.

This article applies to: Outlook for Mac

  1. Right-click (or ctrl-click) the message in your Inbox or other folder (do not open the message).
  2. From the menu that appears, select View Source.

Your text editor (typically an application called TextEdit) will open, displaying all the headers for the message, followed by the message body.

If you need to copy the headers (to paste somewhere else),

  1. Drag over the text from the beginning of the text to the beginning of the body of the message.
  2. Press command-c on your keyboard; this copies the highlighted text to the clipboard.
  3. Then, with an email message or other document open, press command-v to paste the header text into that document.

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