How to Find Email Sender IP Address and Location

Internet emails are designed to carry the IP address of the computer from which the email was sent. This IP address is stored in an email header delivered to the recipient along with the message. Email headers can be thought of like envelopes for postal mail. They contain the electronic equivalent of addressing and postmarks that reflect the routing of mail from source to destination.

Finding IP Addresses in Email Headers

Many people have never seen an email header, because modern email clients often hide the headers from view. However, headers are always delivered along with the message contents. Most email clients provide an option to enable display of these headers if desired.

Internet email headers contain several lines of text. Some lines start with the words Received: from. Following these words is an IP address, such as in the following fictitious example:

Received: from abc.ab.ac (65.54.x.x) by mail1.aol.com with SMTP; 20 Jun 2012 02:27:02 -0000

These lines of text are automatically inserted by email servers that route the message. If only one "Received: from" line appears in the header, a person can be confident this is the actual IP address of the sender.

How do I get the header to start the trace email process?

Each electronic messaging program will vary as to how you get to the message options. I'll cover the basics to start the trace...the rest is up to you.

• GMail - Open the correspondence. In the upper right corner of the email you'll see the word Reply with a little down arrow to the right. Click the down arrow and choose Show Original.

• Hotmail - Right click the memo and choose View Message Source.

• Yahoo! - Right click the note and choose View Full Headers.

You can see that no matter the program, the headers are usually just a right click away.

Internet Email Services and IP Addresses

Finally, the popular Internet-based email services differ greatly in their use of IP addresses in email headers. Use these tips to identify IP addresses in such mails.  

• Google's Gmail service omits the sender IP address information from all headers. Instead, only the IP address of Gmail's mail server is shown in Received: from. This means it is impossible to find a sender's true IP address in a received Gmail.
• Microsoft's Hotmail service provides an extended header line called "X-Originating-IP" that contains the sender's actual IP address.
• Emails from Yahoo contain the sender's IP address in the last Received: entry. 

Then open the website http://www.ip2location.com/demo paste the ip click lookup button. There you will get the complete details of the IP.