How to find the IP address of the sender in Gmail or Yahoo! mail!

How to find the IP address of the sender in Gmail, Yahoo! mail or Hotmail

When you receive an email, you receive more than just the message. The email comes with headers 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. The tutorial below can help you find the IP address of the sender. Note that this will not work if the sender uses anonymous proxy servers, or anonymous remailers or many other devious techniques used by spammers or in general anyone who knows what there doing. This tut is just a basic primer on the subject.

Finding IP address in Gmail

1. Log into your Gmail account with your username and password.
2. Open the mail.
3. To display the headers,
* Click on More options corresponding to that thread. You should get a bunch of links.

* Click on Show original

4. You should get headers like this:

Gmail headers : name
Look for Received: from followed by a few hostnames and an IP address between square brackets.

That is the IP address of the sender.

Use the site below to track the ip:

http://www.arin.net/index.shtml

*Now click on the "NET-24-16-0-0-1" link.

NOTE: Remember to include all the headers of the email along with an attached copy when filling a complaint.

Finding IP address in Yahoo! Mail

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.
4. If you do not see the headers above the mail message, your headers are not displayed. To display the headers,
* Click on Options on the top-right corner

* In the Mail Options page, click on General Preferences

* Scroll down to Messages where you have the Headers option.

* Make sure that Show all headers on incoming messages is selected.

* Click on the Save button

* Go back to the mails and open that mail

5. You should see similar headers like this:
Yahoo! headers : name

Look for Received: from followed by the IP address between square brackets [ ]. Here, it is [209.191.85.107].

That is be the IP address of the sender.

6. Track the IP address of the sender.

The easiest way for finding the original sender is by looking for the X-Originating-IP header, this header is important since it tells you the IP Address of the computer that had sent the email. If you can not find the X-Originating-IP header then you will have to sift through the received headers to find the sender's ip.

Related links:

Abika
Dns Stuff
ScamBusters