Trace the IP Address of an Email or Website

7 Parts:

Locate Email Header in Gmail

Locate Email Header for Mail.com

Locate Email Header in Outlook (Hotmail)

Trace IP Address Info from an Email Header

Find IP Address of a Website with Windows' Command Prompt

Perform Whois lookup for a Domain

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We all receive an odd or suspicious looking email from time-to-time. For whatever reason, it managed to bypass the spam filters and ended up directly in our inbox. Most of the time people delete it without raising an eyebrow. However, if you're of the curious nature and would like to investigate a little further, you can always find the IP address by looking into the header information of the email itself. An IP address is a string of numbers linked to a router that's connected to the internet. Think of it as a phone number that is assigned to a mobile device. Once you've got an IP address, you can then do a bit of additional snooping and find out where that IP is geographically located. Although it may only give you the location of the email server it originated from, this can still come in handy because in most cases, the server is relatively close to the original sender.

The same thing goes for a website. That is, you can trace the IP address of the servers the site is hosted on. So, if you're receiving odd looking links and want to know just where these sites are hosted; you can do a quick search right from Windows' command prompt. You can also do a quick check into who registered the domain of a website. If you're unsure of the legitimacy of a particular site, a quick Whois search can provide quite a bit of useful information.

In the following VisiHow tutorial, we're going to take you through the steps on how to locate the header of an email for; Gmail, Outlook (Hotmail), and Mail.com. We'll then show how to pull the IP address from the header to search for its location. Also, we'll show a simple way to use the command prompt in Windows 10 (any version of Windows will work) to find the IP address of a website. And finally, we're going to show how to perform a Whois lookup to see who registered the domain of a site.

Please remember that in some cases, a user can be connected to a VPN. In this case, the IP address could be from some other country instead of their own. Another thing to consider is that when someone is using a free email provider such as Gmail, the server could be located in another country.

1. 1
   Open the email in question, then click the little triangle (More) to the right of the reply button.

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2. 2
   With the additional options expanded, click "Show original".

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3. 3
   Once the Original Message is open, click the "Copy to clipboard" button.

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4. 4
   Open a text file and paste the original message, then proceed to the section on tracing the IP address from an email header.

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1. 1
   Open the email you want to trace, then click the "I" icon on the far right.

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2. 2
   With the Extended Header Information open, select all the text and copy it to the clipboard.

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3. 3
   Open a text file and paste the copied header information, then proceed to the section on how to trace the IP from an email header.

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1. 1
   With the email you wish to trace open, click the drop-down triangle next to the Reply all button.
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