Tracing An E-mail

Tracing An E-mail

The purpose of this guide is to show the process involved in tracing an email. The first step required to tracing an email is finding out the headers of the email. What are headers? Email headers are lines added at the top of an email message that are used by servers as the email goes on route to get delivered. Generally email clients only show the standard To, From, and Subject headers, but there are more.

1) Enabling Email Headers

Enabling Email Headers For Gmail
Step 1:Once Logged into your Gmail Account open the Email whose headers you want to view. Click on the “More Options” link in the message next to the date of the email.


Step 2: Now click the “Show Original” link.


Step 3: This link will popup a new window the headers and the body of the message.


Enabling Email Headers For Hotmail
Step 1:Once logged in, click on the "Options" link in the upper navigation bar

Step 2: Now click on the "Mail Display Settings" link.
Step 4: Go to your inbox and open any one of your email. You emails show now contain additional headers.


Enabling Email Headers For Yahoo
Step 1:Once logged in, click on the "Options" link in the upper navigation bar.


Step 2: Now click on the "General Preferences" link.


Step 3: In the paragraph titled Messages and locate the "Headers" heading and select "All".

Step 4: Go to your inbox and open any one of your email. You emails show now contain additional headers.


Go to your inbox and open any one of your email. You emails show now In this example, four headers will be added to the email message. This first header is generated by email client on lab.exampleuniversity.edu when forwarding it to the mail server at mail.exampleuniversity.edu. ontain additional headers.


The following header is added when mail.exampleuniversity.edu transmits the message to mail.exampleisp.com
The following header is added when Reciever downloads the email from home machine called reciever.local.


Tracking the sender

Go to your inbox and open any one of your email. You emails show now In this example, four headers will be added to the email message. This first header is generated by email client on lab.exampleuniversity.edu when forwarding it to the mail server at mail.exampleuniversity.edu. ontain additTracking The Orginal Sender
The easiest way for finding the original sender is by looking for the X-Originating-IP header, this header is important since it tells you the IP Address of the computer that had sent the email. If you can not find the X-Originating-IP header then you will have to sift through the Received headers to find the sender's ip. onal headers.