How to show headers and original content of an email

Sometimes you need to see what an email looked like “on the wire” before it was displayed in Private.Ki. The original message view shows the full SMTP headers and the raw message body exactly as we received it, including authentication results and delivery routing information.

This is useful for troubleshooting delivery issues, verifying authenticity, investigating spam/phishing, or reporting abuse.

This option is only available for external emails (messages sent to you from non-Private.Ki addresses). Internal Private.Ki messages are not transmitted over SMTP and therefore do not have traditional email headers.

Open the original message view

Open the email you want to inspect. In the right column (message view), scroll all the way to the bottom of the message. Click the three-dot menu. Click Show original:

This will show you the raw message.

What you will see in Show original

The modal contains two parts:

First, you will see the full email headers. These can include fields such as From, To, Subject, Date, Message-ID, MIME-Version, Content-Type, as well as technical delivery and security headers like Received, Authentication-Results, and DKIM-Signature.

Below the headers, you will see the raw email body. For HTML emails, this includes the full HTML source.

This view is read-only and is shown as text. It is meant for inspection and troubleshooting, not for normal reading.