How to track an IP address?

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Imagine this scenario, you log on to your mail box on a late Sunday morning and find an email from an unknown person with abusive language in it. Reading such a thing on a lazy Sunday morning would certainly ruin your entire day. Now what would you do? Delete it? Agree a solution, but what if the sender decides to send more of such emails? Mark the email address as spam? Yes will work, but it won’t stop the sender from sending emails through some other email address.

In such a situation the solution I would suggest is to identify the sender, it is for sure that such emails do come from someone you know, so it would be better if you know the sender and the take up the matter with him directly. Wondering how would you do it? Read on, I shall explain the method below.

Now I am sure many of you have heard about IP address. For the ones who haven’t, here comes the ice breaker “IP address or Internet Protocol address is a unique set of digits to identify any computer connected to the internet”. Now since every computer has an IP address, it goes without saying that even the email sender would have one. And using his IP address we are going to track him down.

So where do we begin? The first thing to look at is the email itself. Every email sent has something called an email header which carries important information like sender’s IP etc. We shall use this header to find the sender’s IP. So I shall explain the procedure for gmail since it is the most popular email provider right now, you need to follow a similar procedure for other email providers.

Follow these steps:

• Log into your gmail account.
• Open the email.
• Click on the inverted triangle beside Reply. Select Show Original.
• Look out for the following line: Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of TrackMyIP@gmail.com designates 10.204.18.194 as permitted sender) client-ip=10.204.18.194;
• The IP that you see here, i.e. 10.204.18.194 is the sender’s IP.
• Follow similar steps for Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail etc.

Now that we have the senders IP address, I am going to share a website which will show you the location of an IP address, the website is,

http://www.trackmyip.co.cc/

Just enter the IP address in the box and click Search, the location of the sender will be presented to you on a map. Apart from the location the website will let you know the Hostname, City, State, Country and even the Internet Service Provider. 

That’s it! As simple as that, hope this article will be of some use to you. Thanks for reading.