How do i find out where email came from?

Question

How can I find out who the originator of the email was or their location? I received a personal offensive email and I want to track who it came from?

Answer 1

First step is to look in the email headers for x-originating-ip. That is very cheap and easy method. If you are lucky, and SMTP server does not hide that data, also if original sender did not use relay servers, then you will get the IP of the machine from which the email was sent.

If this does not work for you, and you still have good reasons to look for where did the email cam from (for example if it was offensive or fraudulent) then you have following options:

• report the email to police and wait until they find the sender for you

• hire a detective