How To Track IP Address of Real Sender In Gmail?

Did you ever wonder to receive email from someone with your friend’s name? Well, it’s very easy to change the sender name while hiding the email address behind it. This is a simple and popular trick to send emails with Amazon or Google name using fake ids and asking for credentials. Also when browsing, you might have used your email address for sign up on some unauthorized sites. These sites will sell your email to third parties and you will start receiving all sort of emails like prize-winning, suggestions, promotional content, frauds etc.

But, you should know the fact that any email coming to your inbox is sent by someone. There should be an IP address from which the sender is sending you such emails. Though Gmail is good at spam blocking, it does not block all spam emails out of the box. In this article, we will explain how to track IP address of real sender in Gmail and trace the originating location.

Track The Real Sender in Gmail

When you are about to track someone’s IP address through email, you need to know that IP address of the sender is stored in email headers. The email headers are always delivered with the emails to the recipient. Since this information is technical in nature, most of the modern service providers like Gmail and others keep the header of the email hidden. So, you cannot directly look at them. Follow the You need to follow the steps given below in order to find out the IP address of the sender:

Fetching Sender’s IP Address

First of all, sign in to your Gmail account and open your inbox. Open any email that you want to track the real sender. When you have opened the email, go to right-hand side of the email and click on the downward arrow called as ‘More’ button.

You’ll see a number of options and you need to click on ‘Show Original’ option.

Then, you’ll see a new tab is opened and you’ll see an original message written. In original message section, you’ll see ‘Message-Id’, ‘Date & Time’, ‘Sender’s Email’, ‘Your Email’ and many other options.

Now, you need to find the IP address of the sender. Scroll down the page to see some more details with encrypted Ids and IP addresses. What you need to do is, press ‘CTRL + F’ to turn on ‘Find’ function.

Type ‘Received: from’ in the search box and locate the line with ‘Received: from’. In that line, you can find the sender’s IP address as shown below.

In some emails, you might see multiple ‘Received: from’ lines. These lines could be inserted by the spammers in order to confuse the recipients. This also happens when the email is passed through multiple email servers. In order to look for the originating sender’s IP address, you need to check the ‘Received: from’ line which has the IP address at the last position.

When you have the sender’s email address, it’s time to track this IP address.

Tracking the Sender’s IP Address

Open the IP tracker website in a new browser tab. This site will be helping you in finding the location and other details like ISP, organization, time zone, IP currency etc. Scroll down a little bit and you’ll see ‘Enter an IP address or domain’ bar. Here you need to enter the IP address which we have found recently from the previous steps. Enter the IP address and click on ‘Trace IP with IP Tracker’ button.

You’ll see that the information has been provided to you in an understandable table format and also a map on the left-hand side of the country/state/city in which that IP is located in.

The first section of the table will be indicating the whole IP locator and some basic info about the IP address. Here, you can be able to see the IP address, reverse DNS, hostname, nameservers.

The second section is about the lookup IP address location in which you can see the geographical location. You’ll see the continent, county, capital, state, city, postal code, area, ISP, organization, time zone etc. This information will help to find the real location of the person sent that email to you. If the location is not familiar, you can safely assume it was a spam email.

The third section is the extra part showing details like longitude / latitude, etc. and you don’t need to look much deeper into it.

What Can You Do After Finding the IP?

Well, you can’t block the sender based on IP address in Gmail. Basically you can block the sender’s email or create filter to send the email to junk automatically. Remember, the above explained method is very useful in situations when you receive emails from the known names but you are suspicious about the source of sender.

For example, the email may claim to be sent from one of your old friend’s name and you may not remember the exact email id. In this case verifying the IP address can help from where exactly it was sent and decide it’s a spam or real. At any case, don’t provide financial and confidential information over Gmail to anyone.

Finding the Real Email Address in Gmail Mobile App

Unfortunately Gmail does not show the email header information on mobile app, both on Android and iOS. So, you should go to desktop when you want to track the IP address of real sender.

Conclusion

In the above guide, we have explained about how to track the real sender in Gmail. When you are looking for the IP address, make sure it is written at the last position of the ‘Received: from’ line. Once you have the IP address location of the sender, it might help to understand the sender is real person or fake id.