Find Location of Email Sender Using Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail

Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 9, 2008 at 8:26 AM

It often happens that we are interested in knowing the approximate location (city name at least) of the person who have sent you an email on your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account.

Well, many may not know, but yes you can have the city name of the sender using certain information that comes with your email. When you receive an email, you receive more than just the message.

The email comes with headers (that are normally not displayed in the message) that carry important information that can tell where the email was sent from and possibly who sent it. For that, you would need to find the IP address of the sender. Okay let’s start learning on how you can find the IP address of the sender.

Finding IP address With Gmail

  1. Log into your Gmail account with your username and password.
  2. Now open any email from your inbox (or the one you want to track the location)
  3. On the left side of the To panel, click on down arrow button, that will open a drop down menu.
  4. Click on “Show Original”
  5. A New window will open, which will have plenty of raw material. Don’t get confused here…! try to find out following line
  6. Look for “Received: from” Received: from [69.138.30.1] by web4587.mail.***.yahoo.com
  7. [69.138.30.1]  can be different for every mail, as this is the IP address of the sender.
  8. You may find more than one Received: from patterns, in that case select the last one.
  9. Now that you have an IP address, you can locate this IP address by puting it in who.is
  10. open www.who.is and enter this ip address without brackets
  11. the query will give you the city name of the sender…!

Finding IP address with Yahoo

  1. Log into your Yahoo! mail with your username and password.
  2. Click on Inbox or whichever folder you have stored your mail.
  3. Open the mail that you want to track back.
  4. If you do not see the headers above the mail message, your headers are not displayed. To display the headers
  5. Click on Options on the top-right corner
  6. In the Mail Options page, click on General Preferences
  7. Scroll down to Messages where you have the Headers option
  8. Make sure that Show all headers on incoming messages is selected
  9. Click on the Save button
  10. Go back to the mails and open that mail
  11. You should see similar headers like above
  12. Look for Received: from followed by the IP address between square brackets [ ]. Here, it is 202.65.138.109.
  13. That is be the IP address of the sender.
  14. If there are many instances of Received: from with the IP address, select the IP address in the last pattern. If there are no instances of Received: from with the IP address, select the first IP address in X-Originating-IP.
  15. 7. Track the IP address of the sender

Finding IP address in Hotmail

  1. Log into your Hotmail account with your username and password.
  2. Click on the Mail tab on the top.
  3. Open the mail.
  4. If you do not see the headers above the mail message, your headers are not displayed. To display the headers,
  5. Click on Options on the top-right corner
  6. In the Mail Options page, click on Mail Display Settings
  7. In Message Headers, make sure Advanced option is checked
  8. Click on Ok button
  9. Go back to the mails and open that mail
  10. You should see the email headers now.
  11. If you find a header with X-Originating-IP: followed by an IP address, that is the sender’s IP address Hotmail headers. In this case the IP address of the sender is [68.34.60.59].
  12. Look for Received: from followed by IP address within square brackets[
  13. In this case, the IP address of the sender is [69.140.7.58].
  14. Or else if you have headers like this
  15. Look for Received: from followed by IP address within square brackets[].
  16. In this case, the IP address of the sender is [61.83.145.129] (Spam mail).
  17. 10. If you have multiple Received: from headers, eliminate the ones that have proxy.anyknownserver.com.11. Track the IP address of the sender

    

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Category: Featured, IT, Ideas, Tutorials, internet, software, tricks

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Comments

  1. Abdussamad @ August 17th, 2008 10:37 pm

    If the sender is using webmail like gmail then the ip address shown may not be the user’s but the webmail provider’s server. I know this is the case if the sender is using gmail or yahoo using his web browser (webmail interface) and not through his email client (SMTP).

    [Reply]

  2. Khalid Ahmed @ October 24th, 2008 1:06 pm

    I cant see any such settings in hotmail account.

    [Reply]

 

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