{"id":106,"date":"2026-10-06T13:21:36","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T10:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/what-is-an-email-header-and-how-do-you-read-it\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T13:21:36","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T10:21:36","slug":"what-is-an-email-header-and-how-do-you-read-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/en\/what-is-an-email-header-and-how-do-you-read-it\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is an Email Header and How Do You Read It?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>What is an email header?<\/h2>\n<p>An email header contains technical information describing how a message was sent. In addition to visible information such as sender, recipient and subject, it can contain routing and authentication details.<\/p>\n<h2>From and Reply-To fields<\/h2>\n<p>The From field identifies the visible sender. A Reply-To field can direct responses to another address. In suspicious messages, unexpected differences between these fields may require additional investigation.<\/p>\n<h2>Received lines<\/h2>\n<p>An email can pass through several mail servers before delivery. Each server may add a Received line to the header, creating a record of the path followed by the message.<\/p>\n<h2>SPF, DKIM and DMARC results<\/h2>\n<p>Fields such as Authentication-Results may show SPF, DKIM and DMARC validation. A PASS result indicates successful validation, while a FAIL result can require closer examination.<\/p>\n<h2>Why is Message-ID useful?<\/h2>\n<p>Message-ID is normally a unique identifier generated for a message. Administrators can use it to locate a specific email in server logs when investigating delivery problems.<\/p>\n<h2>Using headers for fraud analysis<\/h2>\n<p>The visible sender address alone does not prove the true origin of an email. Technical header information should be evaluated together with mail server logs and domain authentication data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Learn how email headers reveal message routing, sender information and authentication results such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[114,228,226],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email-security","tag-e-posta-guvenligi","tag-email-header","tag-smtp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mx1mail.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}