Tracing location of email sender

Often it becomes very useful to track the location of the person who is sending you the email for verification purposes. Here are the simple steps by the way of which you can easily track the location by determining the IP Address of the email. The email comes with headers that carry information that can tell where the email was sent from and possibly who sent it.

The process of tracking the location basically comprises of two steps :

1. Finding the IP Address of the sender in email header.
2. Lookup the location of the email address.

Step 1 : Finding the IP address of an email sender in GMail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook

Finding IP Address with Gmail

1. Log into your account and open the email in question.
2. Click on the down arrow that’s to the right of the Reply link.
   
3. Click on Show Original from the list.
4. A new window will open, which will contain lot of information. Look for "Received: from". The IP Address just following this tag is the Ip Address of the sender. There might be lot of "Received: from" in the header because it contains IP Address of all the servers involved in routing the email to you.
5. The person who originally sent the email is the last "Received: from" pattern in the header.
   

Let's go through Yahoo and Outlook before talking about tracking the location of that IP address.

Finding IP Address with Yahoo Mail Beta

1. Log into your account and open the mail you want to track back.
   
2. At the top right, you’ll see there is a drop-down option where Standard Header is selected by default.
3. Click on it and choose Full Header.
4. A new window opens up where you see the same information. Search for the last "Received: from" tag.

Finding IP Address with Microsoft Outlook

1. Open the email in Outlook by double-clicking on it.
2. Go to View at the top menu (the menu options for the email, not the main Outlook window).
3. Click on Options menu.
4. A dialog box appears where you see the the Internet Headers box. Again search for the last "Received: from" tag.

Step 2 : Tracking the location of an IP address

After determining the originating IP address, next step is where that is! You can do this by perform a location lookup on the IP address. Useful sites for this are IP2Location and GeoBytes IP Locator.

If you want more information, you can do a WHOIS database search also. Go to WHOIS Database Search. This will give you information on who hosts that IP address and their registration information. You can always contact them to try and find more information on that particular IP address.