Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Knowing the IP of an Email sender

OK guys....so what if somebody someday hacks open your account and sends mails to all your friends? However you somehow manage to regain control of your account and now you wish to know who did this thing to you? Well one way to give you a clue is to get to know the person's IP address from which he accessed your account. This can be easily done if he has sent mails to somebody you know. In the following few lines I will describe the method of finding the IP of that person. I am assuming that you use either Gmail or Yahoo. If you use any other mail account then the same thing can be done but with slightly different clicks which hopefully you will be able to figure out for yourself.

Ask that somebody who has received the mail to open the mail. If you are using Gmail then:

-Click on the small inverted triangle next to the reply button (see the reply button? It's just next to the show details which is again next to the from line)

-Once you do that you get a drop down menu having options like Reply to all and filter messages blah blah blah. In that small list you have an option of "show original"

-Click on show original and a whole lot of details suddenly pop up in a new tab (if you using Mozilla Firefox. If you are not then too it pops up. No worries)

-Somewhere in the initial lines there will be a line Received from followed by some info and the IP address of the sender in the square brackets. There you go!

If the receiver is a Yahoo user:

-Open the mail

-Scroll down to the bottom of the page (not the mail but the page).

-There is an option of selecting the message encoding. We are not concerned with that. There is an option of Full Headers just next to this message encoding thingy. Click on it

-Whole lots of details pop up (in the same tab even if you are using Mozilla Firefox...duh!)

-In the tangled mess of all those details there is a line that gives you the IP of the receiver (Received from line).


However one of the drawbacks in this entire procedure is that if the mail has been sent using a Gmail account it is not possible to know the IP by this procedure because Gmail does not send this information in its headers. (Header is basically the whole lot of information that pops up apart from the mail content). But the procedure works wonderfully well if the sender is not a Gmail user.

No comments:

Post a Comment