How to track the physical location of an email sender

Have you ever wanted to know what medium (web browser, email client or client on mobile device) was used to send an email? If it was sent through a mobile device, what network was it sent from? Where was the email sent from geographically speaking? Well, nowadays, you don't need to be a hacker or guru in order to know most of this information. You just need to use some tools that can be found on your own computer or online.

The first thing you need to know is that an email consist of three different parts: The envelope, the header and the body message. In this article, we will concentrate in the most important of the email, the header which will allow us to get an answer to our questions. The header of a message contains the routing information of a message, time stamps and some others such as TO and FROM headers.

Steps to analyze an email header

1. Get the email header of the email you want to verify. Google has clear instructions on how to do so.
2. Copy the whole header of the message and paste into a header analyzer tool and analyze it. It will look like this:
3. Use an IP Tracker tool in order to trace the location of more and less the email was sent from. In the example above, the IP was 68.196.33.39. Be aware that this location is not 100% accurate. If the device was sent via mobile device, the message transfer agent at the cellphone provider will stamp the IP address or DNS name of the server that received the email. Normally the DNS name will have the provider name and if it's the IP you can do an nslookup against it.