How to track an email sender location and IP address?

You get Email from many locations, you may require to know senders location. Know how to track an email sender location and IP address.  

Are you eager to know how to track an unknown email sender’s location and IP address?  It can definitely be a great assistance in circumstances when you are not sure about the genuineness of the message and it appears to be a spam.

Spam and phishing emails are common among corporate and business environments and hackers try to steal valuable information through such mails. Hence, it’s important to trace the IP address and location of sender, before replying to any email.

There are two steps to trace the location of a sender,

1. Finding the IP address by analyzing the email header.
2. Finding the actual location of sender through a reverse DNS service like, http://ip-lookup.net/

 Step 1: Finding the IP address by analyzing the email header

Usually the IP address of sender is stored in the email header which is sent to recipient along with actual message. For people using G-mail, you can follow below steps to find the sender’s IP address,

1. Open your Inbox and the mail for which you need to find the source IP address
2. You can find a Reply button in top right corner and an arrow next to it which points downwards.
3. When you open the drop-down menu, you can find an option “Show Original” in the list upon clicking which you can view the e-mail header.

In the source code of the mail, you can search for keyword “Received: from” which will get you to something like below,

“Received: from mx-out.facebook.com (outmail020.snc4.facebook.com. [66.220.144.154]). The IP address between the square brackets is address of sender.

4.      In case of Yahoo mail, you can view the email header by selecting the “View Full Headers” option which pops up when you right-click the subject of the email.

Similarly if you use Hotmail, AOL or Rediffmail you can view the email header and find out the IP address of sender.

Step 2 : Finding the address of the unknown email sender

Once you find the IP address of the sender, you can use an IP lookup tool which fetches the location of the sender by doing a reverse lookup from DNS (Domain name space) server. There are many free services available and one of the popular websites for IP lookup is http://ip-lookup.net/. For example, when you enter the source IP got from your email header in the IP-lookup tool, you can get the location as below,

Lookup an IP address : 66.220.144.154

IP         :           66.220.144.154                Neighborhood

Host     :           outmail020.snc4.facebook.com

Country           :           United States

The IP address can be used to track the ISP of the sender which will help you in finding the geographical location of the sender. But if the sender makes use of anonymous proxy servers to send mail to you, it will not be possible to find actual location or IP address of sender. Hope this article provided some useful information about tracking the location and IP address of the sender.