Trace an E-Mail

people who use Yahoo or Hotmail email, thinking that their true identity and location are hidden, might be very surprised to find out that the IP address of the computer used to send the spam email can be uncovered and traced with eMailTrackerPro, many times leading directly to a person.

two of the methods are :

1. E Mail Tracker
2. Examining Email Headers

1. Use eMailTrackerPro

The first step is to use an email analysis tool like eMailTrackerPro, which will automatically analyze an email and its headers and provide a report similar to the following:

Tracing an email address: If you do not have an actual email message, but only have an email address, you can trace the address its email server. However it should be noted that email addresses can be easily forged, the results from tracing an email address may not be related to the true sender.

In most cases, using an email tracking tool like eMailTrackerPro to trace an email message you have received is your best option. To trace an email message received by someone else, have them forward the message to you as an attachment (just forwarding the message itself will show them as the sender). You can then open the attached message and copy the email header, start eMailTrackerPro and paste the header for analysis.

But, if you want to understand how email tracer tools work, continue reading...

2. Email Internet Headers

Every received email has Internet Headers. Using Microsoft Outlook as an example (other mail programs are very similar), just follow these steps to view the headers:

1. Right-click on the mail message that is still in your Outlook Inbox
2. Select 'Options...' from the resulting popup menu
3. Examine the 'Internet Headers' in the resulting 'Message Options' dialog

TIP: Right-click in the 'Internet Headers' field and click on 'Select All' in the popup menu (or type ctrl-A). Then right-click again and click on 'Copy' in the popup menu (or type ctrl-C). Finally, paste all the Internet Headers into your favorite text editor for full examination (such as 'Notepad', included with Windows).

Example: What you see will be very similar to the following (with 'line numbers' added for clarity and discussion in following sections):

1: Received: from tes1a623.OneMail.com.sg ([203.127.89.129]) by visualroute.com (8.11.6) id f9CIVSk24480; Tue, 12 Oct 2004 12:31:29 -0600 (MDT)
2: Message-Id: <200110121831.f9civsk24480@s2.domain.com>
3: Received: from drb.com (IIM1608 [203.127.89.138]) by tes1a623.OneMail.com.sg with SMTP (Microsoft Exchange Internet Mail Service Version 5.5.2448.0)
4: id 4XNK9ATR; Wed, 13 Oct 2004 01:19:10 +0800
5: From: paylesslongdistance@somedomain.com
6: To: <>
7: Subject: Long Distance - 4.9 cents per min - NO FEES!
8: Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2004 13:24:26 -0400
9: X-Sender: paylesslongdistance@yahoo.com
10: X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1
11: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
12: X-Priority: 3
13: X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
14: X-UIDL: 8`Y!!0GR!!"?H"!k:O!!
15: Status: U

Header Line Syntax: The Internet Header Fields are just a series of text lines, where each line looks like:

Header-Name: Header-Value

And if a line starts with a tab or spaces, like line 4 above, that line is a continuation of the previous Header-Value line. So, the Header-Name Received in line 3 has a Header-Value that spans lines 3 and 4.

Courtesy : Visualware