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Find the headers

View full headers in Yahoo Mail and AOL Mail

In Yahoo Mail on the web, open the message, click the More (three dots) icon and choose View Raw Message. AOL Mail works the same way.

4 min read · updated 2026-10-26 · 2 RFC sections cited

In Yahoo Mail on the web, open the message, click the More icon (three dots, labelled "More options") in the toolbar above it, and choose View Raw Message. The full message, headers first, opens as plain text in a new browser tab. Press Ctrl+A, copy, and paste it into the analyser. AOL Mail, run by the same company, uses the same More → View Raw Message path.

Steps (Yahoo Mail on the web)

  1. Sign in to Yahoo Mail in a desktop browser and open the message.
  2. In the toolbar above the message, click the More icon (three dots).
  3. Choose View Raw Message.
  4. A new tab opens showing the message as plain text.
  5. Click in the page, press Ctrl+A (Cmd+A on a Mac), then Ctrl+C (Cmd+C).
  6. Paste into the analyser.

This is the path in Yahoo's help article for the current Yahoo Mail, Find delivery delays and identify sender in New Yahoo Mail. Yahoo's older help pages for the previous desktop design describe the same More → View Raw Message path. If your toolbar looks different, look for a three-dot or "more" control attached to the open message and an item mentioning raw.

What you'll see

The raw message tab is a plain text page with no formatting, buttons or summary. It's the complete message: the header section, then a blank line, then the body (RFC 5322 §2.1), usually with parts encoded in base64 or quoted-printable.

The first lines are the ones Yahoo's own servers added on delivery. Expect Received: lines from Yahoo's inbound servers, an Authentication-Results: line with Yahoo's SPF, DKIM and DMARC verdicts, and a handful of Yahoo-specific X- lines. The sender's own fields (From:, Subject:, Date:, Message-ID:) appear further down.

Because each server adds its Received: line at the top of the message (RFC 5321 §4.4), the lowest Received: line is closest to the sender and the top one is Yahoo's final delivery step. Yahoo's help page points out the same thing and suggests comparing the timestamps to find where a delay happened; Why is my email delayed? explains how to read those gaps, and the analyser draws them as a timeline for you.

Copying it

Since the raw message is a bare text page, Ctrl+A selects everything on it, which is exactly what you want. You'll copy the body too; the analyser ignores everything after the header section, so there's no need to trim.

On very large messages (big attachments), the tab can be slow to load and copying may take a moment. If the page is enormous and your browser struggles, select from the top of the page down to the first blank line by hand instead; that's the whole header section.

AOL Mail

AOL's help article Use full headers to find delivery delays or a forged email's true address in AOL Mail gives the same steps for the current AOL Mail: open the message, click the More icon and choose View Raw Message. An older AOL article called the item View Message Source under a More dropdown, so you may see that wording on older layouts. We couldn't load the full text of AOL's page while checking, only its search summary, so treat the exact label as likely rather than certain.

Copying works the same as in Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo Mail and AOL apps

Yahoo has help pages filed under its Android and iOS app sections that describe View Raw Message, but the text of those pages says it applies to the old desktop version of Yahoo Mail. We couldn't confirm that the current Yahoo Mail or AOL apps can show raw messages. If yours has a three-dot menu on the open message, it's worth a look; otherwise, use the phone guide or a computer.

Common snags

  • "View Raw Message" opens a blank tab. A popup blocker or privacy extension may be interfering. Allow popups for the Yahoo or AOL mail site and retry.
  • You used the wrong three dots. The toolbar has a More icon for the open message. The message list has its own controls. Open the message first so the toolbar applies to it.
  • The message is in Spam. That's fine, and often exactly where you want to look. Raw view works there too. Don't click links in the message while you're at it.
  • You're using Yahoo Mail through another app (Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird). Then follow that app's guide: Outlook, Apple Mail or Thunderbird. You'll see the same Yahoo headers.
  • Yahoo's help talks about "Mailfrom" and "the bottom From". Its article mentions comparing addresses in the headers to spot forged senders. The analyser does that comparison for you: it lines up the From domain with the domains SPF and DKIM actually checked.

Next

Paste the raw message into the analyser, then:

Got a suspicious email?

Paste its headers into the analyser. It runs on your device and explains every result on this page.

Open the analyser

Related

How to view full email headersEvery major mail app hides the raw headers behind a menu item with a different name. Here is where each one keeps them and what to copy. View full headers on a phoneiPhone Mail, the Gmail app and the Outlook app don't show full headers. Use webmail in a browser, a computer, or forward the message as an attachment. How to read Received headersReceived headers are the message's travel log, newest on top. Read them from the bottom, and trust only the hops added by servers you trust. Why is my email delayed?How to measure the delay between each Received hop, a worked example with time zones, and the usual causes: greylisting, sender queues, spam filtering, outages, clock skew and Date headers set long before sending. Spotting phishing from the headersA checklist in order of usefulness for judging a suspicious email from its headers, an annotated spoof example, the limits of what headers can tell you, and what to do next.

Next in Find the headers: View full headers on a phone →