how can i find out who sent an email from my email address

Question

i believe someone "hacked" my email and sent 2 emails from my account without me knowing. I use outlook 2010, our email is hosted by rackspace. Everything points that i sent the 2 offending emails, even though i cant find them in my sent items in outlook. Whoever sent the mails, used the BCC fields to hide to recipients and all i can get out of our server host is them mails were sent from an android device. Which i do not have! Can anyone help? the message header i have from one of the recipients shows i did it, but i know i didnt.

Answer 1

Debra indicated the important things:

• The sender e-mail address is very easy to forge. You cannot rely on it at all.
• In the complete headers of the e-mail you can find at least the IP address of the machine which delivered the e-mail to the destination mail server.

If the deceiver was not clever enough you can possibly trace him from this information. It could be his address directly or could have used mail transfer agent which logged the sender's IP address and you can trace him.

You can find basic information about the tracing for example in the article How to Track the Original Location of an Email via its IP Address. The IP addresses of the sender/agents (there could be multiple intermediate agents in the path) can be found in the Received: header. Sometimes you can also find X-Originating-IP: header. Also the Date: header could help to determine at least the time zone of the sender/agent.