Feature request - View message headers

[roaima]

I have had a number of support requests recently that have required me to access users' mailboxes and review the headers of particular messages. In none of these instances was I interested in the message body content as such. I can do this with Exchange Online but it's fiddly, and actually it would be far easier to use to the most recent Veeam backup.

When I navigate through the backups to a particular message and choose Open, it provides the message content and just a very brief subset of headers (From, To, Subject, Date). Would it be possible to provide access to the full message headers from the backups? Ideally, to mitigate potential privacy issues, this would be an option that didn't require opening and viewing the message body content.

Thanks,
Chris

[Andreas Neufert]

Just an idea. You can export it to a msg file and open it in your E-Mail application to look into the header.

[Mike Resseler]

Chris,

I will ask the developers what is possible. But honestly, I did not had this request before. May I ask what the specific reasons where for those support requests to review the full message headers? I'm trying to understand what a good reason would be for these requests to header information.

Thanks
Mike

[Kostya]

Chris, any idea/suggestions on how should it looks like in VEX GUI? What would be the best option for your task?

[roaima]

Hi Mike,

You were asking for reasons...

May I ask what the specific reasons where for those support requests to review the full message headers? I'm trying to understand what a good reason would be for these requests to header information.

The most recent situation was that someone had complained they hadn't received an email. We eventually managed to persuade our hosted antispam provider to release it (not that hard, actually) but it still arrived tagged as junk by O365. I wanted to see the headers as part of an investigation to try and identify why the message was being blocked. (SPF, DKIM, broken rDNS, badly named hosts, Friday afternoon, that sort of thing.) It seemed to me I had a couple of choices

1. Get the user to forward the message as an attachment (different to just forwarding it, and regardless of how I explain it, I almost always get forwarded messages rather than messages sent as an attachment).
2. Grant myself permissions to view the user's mailbox and look at the headers directly in the message.
3. Look at the message headers in some other tool.

I'm conscious of privacy issues, even (or especially) in an organisational environment that crosses international boundaries. I really don't want to see the content of a confidential message when all I need are the headers, and my options #1 and #2 both leave me with full visibility of the entire message. Arguably if I had an option #3 I wouldn't even need to obtain permission from the user (or user's manager) to view the message headers because it's not message body content. (Please leave aside the technical triviality of my looking at any member of staff's mailbox without them knowing. Privacy is a human-ethical-legal issue and not a technical one, but if it can be helped with technology so much the better.)

Does this help?

Regards,
Chris

[roaima]

Helo Kostya,

Any idea/suggestions on how should it looks like in VEX GUI? What would be the best option for your task?

Within the existing VEX one can navigate through the date/time backup and into someone's mailbox. From there one can go into (say) INBOX and select a message.

When I right-click on a message I get a number of options, including Restore, Export to PST, and the default, Open. For me, I think we need two new hooks:

1. A new "Show headers..." item in that context menu, which would open up the message headers but without the body content. If you wanted to be clever you could offer some parsing of the information like the "MessageHeaderAnalyzer" plugin within Outlook client can offer, but the essential requirement for me is to be able to see all the header lines exactly as they were received, without reordering and without munging.
2. On the current message pane window (obtained via the Open entry in the message's right-click context menu), a toggle button to switch between the simple summary header information you provide (From, To, Cc, Subject, Sent) and the full headers.

Regards,
Chris

[Mike Resseler]

Chris,

Thanks for the feedback. For your information, Kostya and I have been discussing this for a while and while certainly not yet definitive (so no, no promises ) it seems that this could be a feature that makes one of the next versions of the Veeam explorer.

The issue is (as you probably have guessed) how to show it. Headers can be long so your feedback on how you want to view it is also appreciated

Thanks
Mike

[Kellen.Flood]

@mike resseler Will V1.5 of VBO365 allow for more granular permissions....Example someone can only see the Email header but not the actual email?

[Mike Resseler]

Hi Kellen, it is on the radar, but it won't make 1.5 unfortunately. Viewing message headers will be in there, but the person who can do that will also be able to see the actual mail. But your request counts as a vote for this feature

[nielsengelen]

You could however use the REST api, get the item and parse it. Afterwards output the headers and hide the rest. It requires some coding but should be possible.