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Recently I asked my colleague to send an email on Friday(4th October 2013). He failed to send me a mail on that day.

He simply changed the system date and time to Friday and sent me a mail on Monday yet it appears in my email client that it was sent on Friday. Is there any way to prove that he sent the mail on Monday?

I looked at his sent items but it shows Friday's date. I need to prove that he made the system date time to send me a mail on Monday. Both of us were using Windows 7 32 bit operating systems.

How to prove when the email was sent?

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  • Do you have access to the email logs?
    – Dave
    Oct 8, 2013 at 5:11
  • @DaveRook rightnow i can see only email logs of my email,i dont have access to his email logs
    – BlueBerry - Vignesh4303
    Oct 8, 2013 at 5:12
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    I mean, on the server. If you (your company) is hosting it's own smtp server then you can get access to the logs.
    – Dave
    Oct 8, 2013 at 7:13

2 Answers 2

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The email headers will show the timestamp of the message when it was handled by each mail server, very likely this will include your correspondent's SMTP server (his ISP's server) and your server (one or more of your ISP's servers).

To access the email headers in your copy of Outlook read this guide.

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  • link only answers go out of date. There is nothing wrong with copying the content of the cited site and pasting it into your post (and keeping the link to show where it's been sourced)! If you copy the relevant part into your answer, I will then remove my -1
    – Dave
    Oct 8, 2013 at 7:12
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    And Microsoft changes the method of doing pretty much anything in their software, so even step-by-step instructions will be out of date given enough time anyway. Since the OP hadn't included which version of MS Outlook he's using, pointing to the "View" menu and "Options" or the "Tools" menu and "Options" may or may not be at all useful. When the OP specifies which version of Outlook he's using, I'll give explicit instructions and not before. Otherwise I'll tell him to telnet into the POP3 server and RETR the message manually.
    – Ben
    Oct 8, 2013 at 9:06
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The header of the email could give you that information, as each mail server the message passes through adds the time (based on the server's clock) that the message was received on that leg of the journey to your machine.

If you can't see the full header of the email, here are directions for finding this setting in all versions of Outlook.

Microsoft has a breakdown of how to read their Outlook headers here.

From that Microsoft page, the field you'll want to look at is X-OriginalArrivalTime, as:

This is a time stamp placed on the message when it first passes through a server running Microsoft Exchange.

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