How to see complete information in Outlook

From Heinz Tschabitscher, http://email.about.com/mbiopage.htm
Your Guide to Email, http://email.about.com/

In an ideal world, we'd never have to look at an email message's header lines.

http://email.about.com/cs/outlooktips/qt/et011302.htm

They contain such boring information as which server picked the message up from which other server at which time. While not particularly interesting normally, this information is required to identify the true origin of an email message, in particular of spam.

Like many other options, the ability to show these headers does exist in Outlook, but it is a bit hidden.

View All Message Headers in Outlook

http://email.about.com/od/outlooktips/qt/et010905.htm

To display all of a message's headers lines in Outlook:

Open the message in a new window in Outlook.
Select View | Options... from the message's menu.

All header lines appear under Internet Headers at the bottom of the dialog that comes up.

How to View the Complete Message Source in Outlook

A "normal" email client stores messages as it receives them — with all the header lines and the body, separated by a blank line. With its Exchange background and a complicated local storage system, Outlook does this a bit differently.

Outlook Takes Internet Emails Apart

Outlook takes messages it receives from the internet apart as soon as it sees them. It stores the headers independently from the message body and breaks out the individual message parts, too. When it needs a message, Outlook collects the pieces to show just what is needed. You can have it display all the headers, for example.

Unfortunately, the original message structure is lost, though. Even when you save the message to disk as an .msg file, Outlook only saves a slightly modified version (the Received: header lines are stripped, for example).

Fortunately, you can tell Outlook to preserve the complete source of internet messages, though. How Outlook operates will not change, but you can retrieve the original source of messages as they were received at any time.

Make Available the Complete Message Source in Outlook

To set up Outlook so you can see the complete source of emails:

Select Run... from the Start menu.
Type "regedit".
Hit Enter.
Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Options\Mail.
Select Edit | New | DWord from the menu.
Type "SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders".
Hit Enter.
Double-click the newly created SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders value.
Type "1".
Click OK.
Close the registry editor.
Restart Outlook if it has been running.

See the Complete Source of a Message in Outlook

Now you can retrieve the source of newly retrieved messages (editing the SaveAllMIMENotJustHeaders value does not restore the complete message source for emails that were already in Outlook):

Click on the desired message with the right mouse button in the Outlook mailbox.
Select Options... from the menu.
Find the message source under the (now improperly named) Internet headers: section.

This tip is known to work with Outlook 2003 http://email.about.com/od/outlook/