Find Originating Location Of an Email Using Its IP address

Here’s a quick how-to guide on how you can track email to it’s originating location  by figuring out the email’s IP address and looking it up. I have found this to be quite useful on many occasions for verification purposes since I receive lots of emails daily due to my blog. Tracking the IP address of an email sender does require looking at some technical details, so be ready to dig your heels in!


There are basically two steps involved in the process of tracking an email: find the IP address in the email header section and then look up the location of the IP address.
Finding the IP address of an email sender in Gmail.

Let’s go ahead and take a look at how you would do this for Google, Yahoo and Outlook since those are the most popular email clients.

Google’s Gmail

1. Log into your account and open the email in question.

2. Click on the down arrow that’s to the right of the Reply link. Choose Show Original from the list.


Now here’s the technical part that I was telling you about earlier! You need to look for the lines of text that start with “Received: from“. It might be easier to simply press Cntrl + F and perform a search for that phase. You’ll notice that there are several Received From’s in the message header. This is because the message header contains the IP addresses of all of servers involved in routing that email to you.


To find the first computer that originally sent the email, you’ll have to find the Received From that’s farthest DOWN. And at the farthest down you find (Received:72.204.154.191). And the numbers are the IP address of the sender which was

was routed to your ISP’s server and so on and so forth till it got to your email server.


And after all the above process you got the ip of the mailer and you can find its location simply by

1. Goto the search engine and search for "IP to Location" open a link

2. Insert the ip address in the required field and hit search.


and the IP to location will find the location of the IP for you.

Custom Search

Use this trick and havefun