How to: View email Headers in Outlook 2010

April 23, 2010 by Joe G.

Normally I hear my Users complaining about the changes in Microsoft Office, and my standard response is something along the lines of CRY MORE N00b!!!1!11!1!eleventyone! “Well it’s Microsoft, what are you gonna do?”. But today I am feeling their collective pain. See I installed the Office 2010 RTM on my personal workstation.

Is Microsoft trying to make life more difficult for SysAdmins? Specifically, why (for the love of whatever god you believe in) would they hide the button to view email headers? I need email headers. They give me information. Useful information. Like why my spam filter is marking legitimate email as spam (you know little things like that).

Just not in Outlook 2010. Or at least not where it used to be, or where you’d think it should be. See in Outlook 2003, or 2007 (and I’m pretty sure it was even this way in Outlook XP and 2000), you simply right-click the email, and select “Message Options…”, and you get to see header information. Easy, right?

Apparently there is some guy at Microsoft that thought this was too confusing (or maybe I don’t know, too easy), and simply had to be changed in Outlook 2010. Ok, no problem, I’ll just bust out some Google Fu, and we’ll be off to the races.

10 minutes later, I find my self wanting to fly to Redmond to beat the tar out of that guy. I’ve found several forum posts, and blog entries that describe ways to do it that simply do not exist in the RTM version of Outlook 2010 (I defy you to open an email in the RTM version of Outlook 2010, and find a View tab in the ribbon). Finally I find one that works. Hopefully this saves you guys some trouble.

Method One (the long way):

Open the email Click the File Tab Click the Properties button (?)

Ok, so at least now I know how to view it, but now I have to actually open the email I want the header information for, and this is just way too much work. I want this to be as easy as it was in previous versions of Outlook.

You’ll notice in this screen shot:

That I have a button for showing the “Message Options” (Header information) in the “Quick Access Toolbar” (wasn’t easy to get it there).

Method two (the easier way):

Click the Drop down arrow in the Quick Access Toolbar (“QAT” from here on), and select “More Commands”, as shown below.

Now follow along in the screen shot below: (1) select “All Commands” from this drop down, (2) find and select “Message Options…” , (3) click “Add”, Click “OK”.

Now you can view header information for any email without having to actually open the email, as shown below.

Hey Microsoft: QUIT SCREWING AROUND WITH THE OFFICE INTERFACE!!!

Things like this are why Apple products and Open Office are gaining so much ground on you. I understand updating the Office interface to the ribbon style menus (I don’t like it but I understand it). You should have done it all in 2007, or just waited until 2010 to do any of it.