Here’s a quick guide on how you can track email to it’s originating location by figuring out the email’s IP address and looking it up. I have found this to be quite useful on many occasions for verification purposes since I receive lots of emails due to my blog. Tracking the IP address of an email sender does require looking at some technical details, so be ready to dig your heels in!

There are basically two steps involved in the process of tracking an email: find the IP address in the email header section and then look up the location of the IP address.

Finding the IP address of an email sender in GMail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook

Let’s go ahead and take a look at how you would do this for Google, Yahoo and Outlook since those are the most popular email clients.

Google’s Gmail

1. Log into your account and open the email in question.

2. Click on the down arrow that’s to the right of the Reply link. Choose Show Original from the list.

AOL

For AOL:

1. Log in to your AOL account.
2. Open the message you'd like to view headers for.
3. In the 'Action' menu, select View Message Source.

The full headers will appear in a new window.

Excite Webmail

For Excite:

1. Log in to your Excite account.
2. Open the message you'd like to view headers for.
3. Click the View Full Headers icon located on the right of the 'From:" line.

The full headers for all of your messages will appear in a new window.

Hotmail

For Hotmail:

1. Log in to your Hotmail account.
2. Select Inbox from the left-side menu.
3. Right-click the message you'd like to view headers for and select View message source.

The full headers will appear in a new window.

Yahoo! Mail

For Yahoo! Mail:

1. Log in to your Yahoo! Mail account.
2. Select the message you'd like to view headers for.
3. Click the Actions dropdown menu and select View Full Header.

The full headers will appear in a new window.

Email clients

For Opera:

1. Open Opera.
2. Click the message you'd like to view headers for so it displays in the window below your inbox.
3. Click Display all headers, across from the To field.

The full headers will appear in the window below.

Outlook

For Outlook 2007:

1. Open Outlook.
2. Open a message.
3. On the Message tab, in the Options group, click the Dialog Box Launcher icon image.
4. In the Message Options dialog box, the headers appear in the Internet headers box.

For older versions of Outlook:

1. Open Outlook.
2. Open the message you'd like to view headers for.
3. Click the View menu, and select Options....

The full headers will appear in a new window.

Outlook Express

For Outlook Express:

1. Open Outlook Express.
2. From your inbox, locate the message you'd like to view headers for.
3. Right-click the message, and select Properties.
4. Open the Details tab in the dialogue box.

The full headers will appear in the dialogue box

Step 1: (7/8/2010 12:34:03 PM) User left click on "Show original (menu item)" in "Gmail - An Emergency - - Mozilla Firefox"

Step 2: (7/8/2010 12:34:07 PM) User keyboard input in "Mozilla Firefox" [... Ctrl-C] – Copy selected Contents.

Step 3: (7/8/2010 12:34:15 PM) Open New Tab and go to http://my-addr.com (and there is many websites they do the same.)  then in the left panel you can find Trace Email Finder location. Click on it.

Step 4: (7/8/2010 12:34:17 PM) Paste the Content in text box which you have Copied

Step 5: (7/8/2010 12:34:21 PM) Once you paste the content Click on Button called “GO”

Step 6: (7/8/2010 12:34:28 PM) Now you can see the result down to the test box.