From Heinz Tschabitscher,
Your Guide to Email.
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When a fellow AOL user sends you an email, it goes right to your Inbox. Fortunately, you are not limited to this select group of fine people, though. You can receive emails from anybody with an email address.

What Are Internet Email Headers?

These messages that come from the wide sea that is the internet come to AOL via SMTP, the standard protocol used for transporting mail.

Of course, none of this matters as long as you get your email. But what if it arrives late? What if it is unsolicited?

Messages from the internet have often passed many relays before arriving at AOL. The way SMTP is designed, each of the servers adds routing information to a special part of the message called the "header". This email header contains other information useful for debugging purposes as well and is usually hidden. If you do want to find out where a message was delayed or identify the true origin of spam, you can make AOL show you all the header lines, though.

View all Internet Headers in AOL

To see all internet header lines of an email in AOL:

• Open the desired email message.
• Make sure it reads Sent from the Internet near the top.
• Click Details next to that phrase.

View all Internet Headers in AOL Webmail

In AOL Mail on the web or AIM Mail, you can use a message's Action menu to access all headers.