How to Find the Sender’s Location in Gmail

Gmail does not include the IP address of the sender in the message header so user do user find out the location of the email sender in Gmail?

When John sends an email message to Elizabeth, the IP address of the sender (John’s computer) is included in the header of the outgoing email message. The receiver (Elizabeth) can then perform a simple geo-lookup against that IP address to find the approximate geographic location of the message sender.

Both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail include IP addresses in outgoing message headers but if John is sending an email address using Gmail, or Gmail for Google Apps, his IP address won’t be included in the message.

IP addresses can be considered sensitive information. As such, Gmail may hide sender IP address information from outgoing mail headers in some circumstances.

If the IP address of John is not available, because he is sending email using Gmail, how can Elizabeth determine John’s geographic location? There two options:

Option A: Gmail may include the IP Address

Gmail doesn’t include the IP address of the sender when the sender is using Gmail’s web interface to send email. However if he or she is using a desktop client (like Microsoft Outlook) or a mobile device to send that email, the IP address is often included in the outgoing message.

Open the message in Gmail, click on More – > Show Original and search for the line “Received: from “ – it may have the IP address of the sender that user can map to a physical location with the help of Wolfram Alpha.

Option B: Find the Sender’s Time Zone

When the IP address is not available, user can determine the sender’s very-approximate location from the time-zone of the originating computer. Go userr Gmail Labs page and enable the “Sender Time Zone” feature.

Now open any message in Gmail and click on the down arrow that says “Show details”. The message will display the the current time in the sender’s time zone as shown in the following screenshot.

Next user can use this timezone map to determine countries where the current time is the same as the time displayed in the Gmail message. Obviously this not the most foolproof method as two different countries can be in the same time zone but when the IP address is not available in Gmail, this is the closest user can get.

On a related note, the time zone of userr outgoing Gmail messages is determined from userr computer’s time zone. If user would like userr Gmail messages to show a different time zone, just go to userr computer’s data and time settings and change the time zone.

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Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You get an email from a person with whom user have never interacted before and therefore, before user reply to that message, user would like to know something more about him or her. How do user do this without directly asking the other person?

 

Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person user’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.

No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still help user uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and user should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets user search users by email address so that should make userr job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and user’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.

If user are able to locate that person on Facebook, get his profile picture and then upload it to TinEye – it’s a reverse image search engine so user can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

#4. People Search

Finally, if nothing works, user should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let user perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

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