Did you ever receive a suspicious email you wanted to track down to know more about the sender? While modern email services do come with a lot of built-in security features, keeping a check on the sender of such suspicious emails is always recommended. To track the sender, we need to extract the email headers and some crucial information.
What are Email Headers
An Email is primarily built up of three parts:
- Envelope
- Body
- Header.
The Envelope consists of the internal routing details that are not displayed to the end-user. The Body contains the original message that is visible to the end-user. The Header is that part that contains some information that may not be vital to a user but is definitely required by the email server. Headers contain sender information like sender email, name, IP address, email client, and a lot more. Other than that, Headers also contain information like the receiver’s email, subject, CC, time stamps, etc.
How to extract information from Email Headers
You can use a simple online tool to take out information from the headers. The tool is brought to you by IPTrackerOnline.com. But before using the tool, you need to copy email headers from an email. The process is slightly different for different email clients. But you can follow this guide here to get instructions for your email client.
As an example, in the above image, we have copied the header from an email in Outlook.com web app as follows.
Log in to your account and open the email you want to know the details of. Click the 3-dotted drop-down button and select ‘View Message Source’. Now, wait for the source to load and copy the entire text displayed. While you may be able to read it directly and make some sense of it, it is better to analyze the header with this tool.
TIP: You can know if Sent Email is read or not with Email Tracker.
Track the IP from where the email was sent
Now navigate to the online tool and paste the entire text there. Click on the ‘Analyse’ button and wait for the results.
Once the results are ready, you can scroll down to see the information extracted from the headers. The list of probable originating IP addresses gives you the origin IP address and its location on the map. And you can click the small info button to see the reputation score of the server and some other details about it.
Other than that, you can view time stamps, geographical details and organizational details about the originating IP address. You can further run a whois search on the IP and know more about the owner of the server.
IP Address is the basic essence of tracking emails from their headers. Once you get hold of the IP address, you can practically track down the sender.
This is how to extract information from Email headers. So, the next time you have a suspicious email in your inbox, make sure you track and verify the sender using IP address locator services.
Hope this helps.
