Ever wondered if you would receive an email from someone with your friend’s name? well its very easy to change sender name and hide email address behind it. This is a simple and popular trick to send emails under the name Amazon or Google using fake IDs and asking for credentials. Also, while browsing, you may have used your email address to register on some unauthorized sites. These sites will sell your email to third parties and you will start receiving all kinds of emails such as prizes, suggestions, promotional content, fraud, etc.
but you should know that any email that arrives in your inbox is sent by someone. There must be an IP address from which the sender sends you such emails. Although gmail is good at blocking spam, it doesn’t block all spam out of the box. In this article, we will explain how to track the real sender ip address in gmail and track the origin location.
real sender tracking in gmail
When you are about to trace someone’s ip address through email, you should know that the sender’s ip address is stored in email headers. email headers are always delivered with emails to the recipient. Since this information is technical in nature, most modern service providers like gmail and others keep the email header hidden. therefore, you cannot look at them directly. Follow the steps below to find out the sender’s ip address:
getting the sender’s ip address
first of all, log in to your gmail account and open your inbox. open any email you want to trace back to the real sender. When you’ve opened the email, go to the right side of the email and click the down arrow called the “more” button.
you will see a series of options and you will need to click on the “show original” option.
then you will see a new tab open and you will see an original message written. in the original message section, you will see ‘message-id’, ‘date & time’, ‘sender’s email’, ‘your email’ and many other options.
now, you need to find the ip address of the sender. Scroll down the page to see more details with encrypted IDs and IP addresses. what you need to do is press ‘ctrl + f’ to activate the ‘find’ function.
type ‘received: from’ in the search box and locate the line with ‘received: from’. In that line, you can find the sender’s ip address as shown below.
In some emails, you may see multiple “received: from” lines. these lines could be inserted by spammers to confuse recipients. this also happens when email passes through multiple email servers. To find the ip address of the originating sender, you need to check the “received: from” line which has the ip address in the last position.
when you have the sender’s email address, it’s time to trace this ip address.
related: how to track and block ip address in wordpress?
trace sender ip address
opens the ip tracker website in a new browser tab. this site will help you find the location and other details like isp, organization, time zone, ip currency etc. scroll down a bit and you will see the “enter an ip address or domain” bar. here you need to enter the ip address that we have recently found in the previous steps. enter the ip address and click the ‘trace ip with ip tracker’ button.
you will see that the information has been provided to you in an understandable table format and also a map on the left hand side of the country/state/city that ip is located in.
The first section of the table will list the full ip locator and some basic information about the ip address. here, you can see ip address, reverse dns, hostname, nameservers.
The second section is about the lookup ip address location where you can see the geo location. You will see the continent, county, capital, state, city, zip code, area, isp, organization, time zone, etc. this information will help find the real location of the person who sent you that email. if the location is unfamiliar to you, you can safely assume it is a spam email.
The third section is the extra part that shows details like longitude/latitude etc. and it is not necessary to delve further into it.
related: how to transfer emails between gmail accounts?
what can you do after finding the ip?
well, you can’t block sender based on ip address in gmail. Basically, you can block the email from the sender or create a filter to send the email to the trash automatically. remember, the method explained above is very useful in situations where you receive emails from known names but are suspicious of the source of the sender.
For example, the email may claim to have been sent from the name of one of your old friends and you may not remember the exact email ID. In this case, checking the IP address can help you where exactly it was sent from and decide if it is spam or real. in any case, do not provide financial and confidential information through gmail to anyone.
find real email address in gmail mobile app
Unfortunately, gmail does not display the email header information in the mobile app, both on android and ios. so you need to go to desktop when you want to trace the real sender ip address.