How do I view the full headers of email in MSN Hotmail?

When viewing an e-mail message (in Hotmail, GMail, Microsoft Outlook or anywhere else), the default setting is usually to show only the "simple headers" of the e-mail message -- the "From" address, the subject, the date it was sent, and other familiar details. The "full headers" are the extra information associated with an e-mail message that show where the message originated, and the path that it traveled over the Internet to get to your inbox. This may be important if you want to know the country that a message was sent from, or whether the "From:" address in the message was forged.

From this point forward I'll assume you know what "full headers" are, and why someone might want to view them.

The way to do view full headers in MSN Hotmail is actually a bit counterintuitive: right-click on a message in your inbox, and click "View message source":

The reason this may seem counterintuitive is that when using a website or a web-based service, normally the list of options that come up when you right-click on a link, is determined by your web browser (for example, in Internet Explorer, when you right-click on a link, the options say, "Open", "Open in New Window", "Save Target As...", etc.). Hotmail, though, supplies its own list of right-click options when you right-click on a message link. This is what you would normally expect to do in the context of a Windows program running on your computer -- where many options can be accessed by right-clicking -- but it's unusual behavior for a website. I hunted around for quite a while myself looking for a way to view a message source code in Hotmail, and it never occurred to me to right-click the message!

When you right-click "View message source", a new window will open showing the message headers, looking something like this:

Simply close this window when you're done viewing the headers.

Bennett Haselton is a technology and political blogger who also wrote an article about how to bypass the DansGuardian Internet filter.