Here’s a quick guide on how to track an email to its original location by figuring out the email’s IP address and looking it up. I have found this to be quite useful on many occasions for verification purposes since I receive lots of suspicious emails daily due to my blog. Tracking the IP address of an email sender does require looking at some technical details, so be ready to dig your heels in!
http://www.iptrackeronline.com/ There are basically two steps involved in the process of tracking an email: find the IP address in the email header section and then look up the location of the IP address. It’s worth noting that you usually won’t be able to get the exact location of the actual person who sent the email. For example, if someone in Germany sends you an email using Gmail, the last IP address in the header section will probably be the public IP address assigned to that user from the ISP, which will give you the location of the user ranging from within a mile all the way to the city or region level.
The reason for the wide range is that the IP address that an ISP assigns to a particular user is normally dynamic. This means that the IP address they had when the email was sent may now be assigned to a different user in the region. This is the main reason why you might get a wide geographic area when looking up the location of the IP address.
However, depending on what device people are using to send emails when using Gmail or another online email service, the last IP address might just be the IP address of Google or Yahoo or Hotmail servers, so keep that in mind too.
Another scenario where you might not get any useful info is if the email was sent from a server on a hosting company data center. For example, whenever I get an email from Boxee, the originating IP address is from SoftLayer, which is a big server hosting company. That’s because the email was probably created and sent from the server itself.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Wednesday, August 7th 2013 at 5:00PM
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