Security: Protect yourself from scammers by displaying the actual email address in Outlook

Scammers in the online world are becoming ever more inventive. But making it as difficult as possible for them is up to you. For this purpose, we have prepared this guide on how to display the actual email address for you.

By default, Outlook only displays the display name in the column “From”, which can be chosen freely. At first glance, users might think that they see the actual sender (see image 1).

Actual email address

It can be useful to see the email address that was actually used for sending the respective email. To this end, you can display an additional column. This can only be done in the “classic” version of Microsoft Outlook–in the “new Outlook Client for Windows”, adjusting the columns to your needs is currently not possible.

This makes it easy to realise it if an email is sent only supposedly by a certain person or company while it is actually sent from an email address that does not match the supposed sender! If the actual email address and that in the column “From” do not match, then be on your guard! Somebody is trying to deceive you with a false identity.

Caution! Please immediately delete such emails, do not open attachments and–under no circumstances–click on links contained in the email.

Guide for displaying the actual email address

How do you display an additional column with the essential information of the actual email address of the sender? The images 2–6 show you the individual steps.

Step 1: Select the folder “Inbox” in Microsoft Outlook.

Step 2: Change to the tab “View”.

Step 3: Click on “Add Columns”.

Step 4: Click on “New column...” (see image 3).

Step 5: Enter the values of the new column as described below. We recommend copying the formula with Ctrl+C and paste it with Ctrl+V (see image 4).

Name: Email address

Type: Formula

Formula: IIf(InStr([SearchFromEmail],"/")=0,[SearchFromEmail],[From])

Step 6: After confirming these settings with “OK”, we recommend displaying the new column between the columns “From” and “Subject”. While adjusting the settings, it would be good to increase the number of lines from 2 to 3 (see image 5). This way, the subject will be displayed correctly when using the preview.

Click then on “OK”, so that the column will be available.

From now on, you will see the actual email address used by the external sender and not just the display name! (See image 1 or 6)