When you receive an email, you can see senders email address and name in the header. But this is not really a reliable way to find the sender since those can be faked very easily by changing email headers. However email header contains a lot more information. Most of the email clients don’t display them to users not to disturb the user experience with technical details.
But still you can access that information easily in any email client and get accurate details about email sender including his mail exchange and IP address. Once you find the IP address you can find lot more details about sender such as his geographical location and with more effort, true identify as well.
How to See Header Information in an Email?
This process is entirely depending on email client or service you are using. I’ll show you how to do it in Gmail and then you will be able to figure out how to do it any email service.
- Go to Gmail and open the email which you need to analyze header and find original sender.
- In top right corner of email you will find a drop down menu with the label More. Click on that.
- There click on Show Original.
- It will open another tab and show original textual version of email. There you can find all the details which are there in email header.
- There you can find several Received: by statements. Last one represent the origin point of email and first one is the server which forwards the email to you.
- If you take a closer look you will find more useful information there such as email client used by sender or whether he used a web interface, authentication and is this email a subscription of an email list.
- Now you have the IP address or origin point of email. Based on that you can find lot more information using IP look up too.
- You can use any online WHOIS tool to find location of IP address. Try ip-adress.com, its reverse IP worked well for me.
- There you have better tool, email trace which you can find here. Copy and paste entire header details there and it will give you a detailed report about the sender.
However you might not be able to find the exact sender using this method due to data protection policies and laws. But still you can get a good enough idea about the original sender and path of email very easily. If you are using other email service or client all you have to do is simply get the original textual version of email. Then you can retrieve entire header formation in no time.
Tags: #Email