What Header Detective Actually Checks (and What It Doesn't)

When a message doesn't land the way it should, "check the headers" is the instinctive first move — and Header Detective, InsightForge's header-inspection tool, is where most people go looking. It's a genuinely useful tool for that. It's also easy to assume it does more than it does, and finding that out mid-incident is a bad time to learn it. So here's the honest scope, stated plainly.

What it actually does

Header Detective inspects the header chain on messages delivered through Postmark — the hop-by-hop path a message actually took, in the order it took it. That's the "how did this message get here, and through what" question, and it's the one Header Detective is built to answer: relay hops, timestamps along the way, and the structural chain that a raw header dump gives you but almost nobody reads directly because raw headers are miserable to parse by eye.

What it doesn't do

Header Detective does not independently compute or verify SPF, DKIM, or DMARC authentication results. That's a different category of check entirely — sender authentication, not delivery-path inspection — and it's not something this tool currently surfaces. If your actual question is "did this message pass DMARC," Header Detective isn't the place to answer it today.

It's also scoped to Postmark-delivered messages specifically. InsightForge also ingests Azure Communication Services events, but Header Detective's chain inspection doesn't cover ACS-sourced messages the same way.

Why the distinction matters

A compliance audit or a delivery investigation is exactly the moment you don't want to discover a tool covers less than you assumed. We'd rather you know the actual boundary going in — chain inspection on Postmark messages, not authentication verification, not ACS — than have marketing copy imply a broader capability and let you find the gap yourself under pressure. If SPF/DKIM/DMARC verification is what you actually need, that's worth telling us directly; it's the kind of thing that becomes a real roadmap item once we hear it from someone who needs it, not before.