What do you do when you get flamming emails send by unknown email id which you think could be one among your knowns. I am not talking about the spam mails, I am talking about the mails which are sent to irk you, like abusing your friends or relatives etc. Usually we try to ignore such mails as we think we can’t chanse a guy on internet. However, doing so you are you are encouraging them and biting yourself inside. You can do something which I do to trace emails sent to me. Tracing emails is possible and believe me you need not be a techie to that when I am here to explain it. I traced one such mail sent to me though it was from a friend just to have fun.
Read these steps carefully:
Step 1. Find the IP address of email sender
I am explaining this for some major email services.
If you are a gmail user -
1. Just Log into your gmail account.
2. open the email that you want to trace.
3. Click on the down arrow given below in the image just on the right side of the Reply link. Choose Show Original from the list.

4. Just look for the lines starting with “Received: from“. You’ll see that there are many Received From phrase in the message header. Actually the message headers contains the list of all IP addresses of all the servers through which the email was routed. Even if you did not get what this sentence mean, skip understanding that. Below is the image from online-tech-tips.com where a techie explained the same procedure using his mail. For ease I am using his email header to explain you the same.

Fins the Last Recieved: From from the header. This gives the ip of the first computer through which message originated. As you can see from the above image, the first one is from a computer called “aseem” with the IP address 72.204.154.191. Then it was routed to the ISP’s (internet service provider likeBSNL, Airtel, British Telecom etc) server at eastrmmtao104.cox.net and so on and so forth till it got to your email server.
The computer aseem is the PC of the author who posted these headers on online-tech-tips.com. 72.204.154.191 is his public IP address for his PC in his house.
Surprised!! This IP will help us locate his location. But lets take a look to find how we can get this IP from yahoo mail header.
For Yahoo user (yahoo beta):
Click on it and choose Full Header.

Again, you’ll see the same information as before, just in a different window:

For outlook users:
Microsoft Outlook
Just Go to View at the top menu (the menu options for the email, not the main Outlook window) and choose Options.

You’ll get a dialog box where you can set the message options and at the bottom you’ll see the Internet Headers box. To extract the source IP you need to follow the same procedure as done for gmail account.

Step 2: Tracing the location of senders IP
There are various ways. Easiest way is to copy and paste your email header and email id of sender into email tracking tool at http://www.ip-adress.com/trace_email/.
One more way is to visit sites like IP2Location and GeoBytes IP Locator location lookup on the IP address. There are many sites on web where you can just enter the IP address and you will get the exact location of the ip address on Google map.
Hope this post helped you.
Also, thanks to online-tech-tips.com for nice post How to track the original location of an email via its IP address.
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