How To Find the Sender's Original
IP Address Using Email Message Headers

So you'd like to to find out just who is sending those email love letters, determine the sender of a blackmail message, or just root out the source of a virus emailed to you. There are indeed many such situations where you would like to know who sent a particular email message to you. This article will teach you how to use "Email Headers" to backtrack and find the original sender's IP address. Don't worry, it's not rocket science.

Theory.......

 Email messages, as in the case of their non-electronic cousins, have "envelopes" of a sort. In the case of email the envelope is composed of a series of "Headers". These are just a series of lines of characters which precede the actual email message. Email programs such as Outlook do not normally display these Headers when displaying a message. From these Headers however, the email program is able to extract important information about the message, such as the message encoding method, the creation date, the message subject, the sender and receiver, etc.

 Moreover, just as a postal envelope contains an address, a return address and the cancellation stamp of the post office of origin, an email message in these "Headers" carries with it a history of its journey to your email inbox. Because of this, it's possible to determine the original IP address of the sender.

     Since email programs do not normally display these Headers, we must first learn how to display them. Depending on the program, this is done in a variety of ways. The following sequence details the way to do this using the Windows default email program.

How to see email headers on YAHOO, GMAIL, HOTMAIL, AND AOL MAIL

Yahoo Mail
On Yahoo Mail you need to click "Full header" from menu "Compact header" while you see message.
 

click Compact header first
 

Now choose Full header

 
Headers in Yahoo Mail shown in pop up window

highlight those areas and paste them on this box and click submit  click here to see the empty box

GMail

In Gmail you need to open 'original' email
 

First click for menu
 

In menu choose 'Show original'
 
GMail opens original email in new window or tab

 

highlight those areas and paste them on this box and click submit  click here to see the empty box

Hotmail

As described in hotmail help:

highlight those areas and paste them on this box and click submit  click here to see the empty box

AOL mail

AOL Desktop software does not show headers, so you need to connect to email through www.aol.com via any browser. The View Message Source from context menu allows seeing headers.
 

You need right-click the message in the message list
 

then click View Message Source
 
AOL open new window to show headers

highlight those areas and paste them on this box and click submit  click here to see the empty box