To trace an email, you'll need to locate an email header that came with the email. Every email has email header and message body. An email may be going through a number of hops, and a header is appended with the IP address of the email server processing the email. When an email reaches the final destination, your email provider appends it's IP address to the header. The IP address of the very first header added to the email is the IP address of the sender's mail server.

What is an email header?

The email header contains information about the email such as sender, recipient(s), subject, arrival date/time, attachments, and routing path of email message from the sender to the recipient. Not all email has proper email header which allows you to trace back to the original sender.

Here is an example of email header originating from Microsoft. Each time a mail transfer agent (known as MTA, or email server) receives an email, it adds it's information on top of the header. Hence,tThe IP shown at the very bottom of the email header represents the sender's IP address.

Routing Path and IP addresses of the MTA

As shown in the example email header above, each email server (or MTA) receives an email it adds RECEIVED header with it's IP address and timestamp. In the example above, there are 3 RECEIVED headers as shown below.

The sender's email server IP address is the one at the very bottom, which is 65.54.190.187 in the example above.

Where is email header?

To send and receive emails, we use email clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird. With proliferation of free email providers, many of us use webmail interface provided by Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail. Each client and webmail interface offer different means to retrieve an email header.

Gmail Web Client

Use the instruction below to view email header of an Gmail message.

Yahoo Web Client

Use the instruction below to view email header of an Yahoo message.

• Open the email message you want to locate email header.
• Click on the down arrow next to the More link.
• Select View Full Header to open a popup window with full header.

Outlook Webmail Client

Use the instruction below to view email header of an Outlook message.