Tracing an email!

I am here to tell u the steps of tracing an email.

You can use a simple and free tool provided by danasoft to trace the email which some one sent u.

For this u would need to know the email header of the concerned mail.


Now the question arises : What is an email header?





An email consists of three vital components: the envelope, the header(s), and the body of the message.



In an e-mail, the body (content text) is always preceded by header lines that identify particular routing information of the message, including the sender, recipient, date and subject. Some headers are mandatory, such as the FROM, TO and DATE headers. Others are optional, but very commonly used, such as SUBJECT and CC. Other headers include the sending time stamps and the receiving time stamps of all mail transfer agents that have received and sent the message. In other words, any time a message is transferred from one user to another (i.e. when it is sent or forwarded), the message is date/time stamped by a mail transfer agent (MTA) – a computer program or software agent that facilitates the transfer of email message from one computer to another. This date/time stamp, like FROM, TO, and SUBJECT, becomes one of the many headers that precede the body of an email.


Now u all would think : How do i find an email header?

answer is simple..

For Gmail Users:
1. Open the message you want to view the headers of.
2. Click the down arrow next to the "Reply" link.
3. Select "Show Original" to open a new window with the full headers

For Windows Live Hotmail (Full Version)

1. This does not work with Safari on Mac OS X
2. Right click on the message. (From the list of emails)
3. Select "View Source"
4. A new window with the full headers and HTML source of the email will open

For Yahoo Mail "New" Version

1. Right click on the message.
2. Select "View Full Headers"
3. A new window with the full headers will open

For Yahoo Mail "Classic" Version

1. Click on the message.
2. Click "Full Headers" on the bottom right of the screen



For more preciseness I would like u all to have a glance on a sample header

Here's that:

Return-Path:
X-SpamCatcher-Score: 1 [X]
Received: from [136.167.40.119] (HELO dc.edu)
by fe3.dc.edu (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 4.1.8)
with ESMTP-TLS id 61258719 for example_to@mail.dc.edu; Mon, 23 Aug 2004 11:40:10 -0400
Message-ID: <4129F3CA.2020509@dc.edu>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2005 11:40:36 -0400
From: Taylor Evans
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Jon Smith
Subject: Business Development Meeting
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

* email headers should always be read from bottom to top

Once u get that header open this website in a new page or new tab

http://whatismyipaddress.com/staticpages/index.php/trace-email-source-IP-address

scroll down u would see a headers column there.

paste that header
and click on get source

Done 

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Posted in: Email,INTERNET,Security,Trace