Getting Email Headers to Troubleshoot Email Failures

Email headers play a key role when diagnosing communication issues within a help desk. Depending on what has gone wrong, an agent may need to see the headers of an outgoing or incoming message to work out why a delivery failed, why a message arrived late, or why a customer says they never received a reply. Sharing this header with the support team speeds up diagnosis considerably.

What is an email header?

An email header is a block of metadata attached to every message. It records details such as the sender and recipient addresses, the subject line, sending and receiving timestamps, the mail servers involved, authentication results, relay information and delivery status. Because it maps the exact route a message has taken, it lets you pinpoint precisely where a transmission broke down.

When headers are needed

Outgoing failures, where a message triggered from Zoho Desk never reaches the customer
Incoming failures, where a customer's email fails to generate a ticket
Delivery delays, where a message takes longer than expected to arrive
Bounces, where the recipient's mail server rejects the message
Spam misclassification, where a genuine message is filtered as junk
Authentication failures, covering SPF, DKIM or DMARC checks

Reporting an email failure in Zoho Desk

Open Notifications. Then select Email Failure.
Choose the failed entry. Pick the specific failure you want reported.
Select Report email failure. This flags the entry for review.

Retrieving headers from within Zoho Desk

Locate the email. Find the message that did not reach the customer.
Open its details. Then select Show Original.
Download Header. Save the file and pass it to the support representative.

Retrieving headers from Zoho Mail

Sign in to Zoho Mail. Open the relevant message.
Use More Actions. Choose Show Original.
Save or copy the header. Select Download Full Content to save as a .txt file, or Copy to clipboard to copy the content directly. Select Show Full Content to view the entire HTML source of the formatted message, since only the return path and similar summary details show by default.

Note: Headers can equally be retrieved from other providers such as Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook. For messages sent through custom SMTP or modern authentication, no delivery log is captured because the message leaves directly through the configured SMTP server, though sender, recipient, subject and timestamp metadata is still recorded for reference.