Emails have now become a regular thing. One can’t do without emails nowadays. It is one of the essential tools required to communicate with people. You need it in order to sign up for various social networking platforms. If you want to check what’s up with your friends and buy something online, then you need an email. The downside of it is that this opens you up to a lot of scams and spams. People spend so much of time to sit and clean their inbox. But it is joyful to know that the email one has received itself has enough information to tell about the sender. You can easily trace an email address back to its source; just take a closer look at the email header.
Tracing an Email Address
The email you get apart from the email id of the person who sent it to you contains routing information and the email metadata. Most of the email clients barely display the full email header. They still offer ways to check the email header.
What actually is an IP address?
It stands for Internet Protocol and is web shorthand for the unique number that identifies your route from rest of the Internet. This is actually your public IP, and each computer on your business network and home will also be having an internal IP address so that the router can send the data to the right device. When a message, an email and other data is transmitted from a computer to an external server, like your email provider, its public IP address will accompany it. This allows the know ones to track down the source of the sender.
It should be noted that various techniques allow people to hide their IP addresses with tools like the aforementioned VPNs becoming popular. It may become tough to track anyone down. VPN can keep your data and location secure.
How can the IP address of an email be traced?
If you are receiving emails from someone you don’t trust, then it’s not too difficult to track down the IP address. You will need to find the header information for the email at first. In Gmail, the process is the most straightforward. For doing this, go to the Gmail and open the email in the question.
On the right-hand side, next to the reply button, you will see the icon of an arrow facing downwards. Click on this and Show Original from the list. This will open a window containing long strings of data from the header. Click the Copy to Clipboard button to grab the needed information.
Go now to WhatsmyIp and click on the IP Lookup option. You will find in the menu along the top of the page. Now on the left-hand side, you will see a list of options. Choose now the Email Header Analyzer.
Olivia Jones is a self-professed security expert; she has been making the people aware of the security threats.Her passion is to write about Cyber security, cryptography, malware, social engineering, internet and new media. He writes for Norton security products at norton.com/setup.
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