---
c: Copyright (C) Daniel Stenberg, <daniel@haxx.se>, et al.
SPDX-License-Identifier: curl
Long: header
Short: H
Arg: <header/@file>
Help: Pass custom header(s) to server
Protocols: HTTP IMAP SMTP
Category: important http imap smtp
Added: 5.0
Multi: append
See-also:
  - user-agent
  - referer
  - proxy-header
Example:
  - -H "X-First-Name: Joe" $URL
  - -H "User-Agent: yes-please/2000" $URL
  - -H "Host:" $URL
  - -H @headers.txt $URL
---

# `--header`

Extra header to include in information sent. When used within an HTTP request,
it is added to the regular request headers.

For an IMAP or SMTP MIME uploaded mail built with --form options, it is
prepended to the resulting MIME document, effectively including it at the mail
global level. It does not affect raw uploaded mails (Added in 7.56.0).

You may specify any number of extra headers. Note that if you should add a
custom header that has the same name as one of the internal ones curl would
use, your externally set header is used instead of the internal one. This
allows you to make even trickier stuff than curl would normally do. You should
not replace internally set headers without knowing perfectly well what you are
doing. Remove an internal header by giving a replacement without content on
the right side of the colon, as in: -H `Host:`. If you send the custom header
with no-value then its header must be terminated with a semicolon, such as -H
`X-Custom-Header;` to send `X-Custom-Header:`.

curl makes sure that each header you add/replace is sent with the proper
end-of-line marker, you should thus **not** add that as a part of the header
content: do not add newlines or carriage returns, they only mess things up for
you. curl passes on the verbatim string you give it without any filter or
other safe guards. That includes white space and control characters.

This option can take an argument in @filename style, which then adds a header
for each line in the input file. Using @- makes curl read the header file from
stdin. (Added in 7.55.0)

Please note that most anti-spam utilities check the presence and value of
several MIME mail headers: these are `From:`, `To:`, `Date:` and `Subject:`
among others and should be added with this option.

You need --proxy-header to send custom headers intended for an HTTP proxy.
(Added in 7.37.0)

Passing on a `Transfer-Encoding: chunked` header when doing an HTTP request
with a request body, makes curl send the data using chunked encoding.

**WARNING**: headers set with this option are set in all HTTP requests - even
after redirects are followed, like when told with --location. This can lead to
the header being sent to other hosts than the original host, so sensitive
headers should be used with caution combined with following redirects.

`Authorization:` and `Cookie:` headers are explicitly *not* passed on in HTTP
requests when following redirects to other origins, unless --location-trusted
is used.
