How to find the IP address of an email sender ?

How to find the IP address of an email sender

Whenever you receive an email, you actually receive more than just the message. The email comes with headers that contain important data about the sender and where the email was sent from.

However, note that this won’t work if the sender uses an anonymous proxy server or if you receive an email sent from a Gmail account through a web browser, as Google hides the real IP address of the sender.

On the other hand, if someone sends you an email from their Gmail account through Outlook, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail, you will be able to discover the sender’s IP address.

Gmail

For finding IP addresses in Gmail, open the email message, click on the inverted triangle next to the Reply button, and select Show Original. This will display the email header.

Now look for Received: from, which will be followed by the IP address between the square brackets []. If there are more than one Received patterns, choose only the last one, as that will be the actual address of the sender.

Once you know the IP address, you can track it easily and you will learn how later in the article.

Hotmail

After you have logged into your Windows Live or Hotmail account, go to your Inbox, and search for the email you want to track. Once you right-click on it, you will see a drop-down menu, where the last option will be View message source. Select it to see the email header.

From there, you have a few available options:

• In case you find a header with X-Originating-IP followed by the IP address, that is the sender’s IP
• If that doesn’t work, look for Received: from followed by an IP address
• If you find multiple Received: from headers, eliminate the ones with proxy.com

Yahoo! Mail

Last but not least, searching for an IP address in Yahoo! Mail begins with clicking on the received email message. Next, select the View Full Header option and look for Received: from followed by the IP address between the square brackets [].

That will most likely be the IP address of the sender. If there is more than one series of Received: from, choose only the IP address from the last pattern.

On the other hand, if there are no such patterns, select the first IP address in X-Originating-IP and track it.

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