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How to Trace an Email's Origin

With the amount of emails that we get nowadays you can never be too sure which ones are genuine or not. There are ways of tracking the origin of an email to give you some idea of how reliable it is. Find out how from the following article.

It is not uncommon to get mail in your box from people who you never even gave your email address to. If you want to know how to trace an email's origin the following paragraphs have some ideas that you can try. There are quite a number of ways in which an email can be looked and we will look at some of those ways here.

One way of how to trace an email's origin is to try and use the IP address of the sender. The composition of an email is said to be there parts, the envelope, the header, and the body text. The header part of the email is the one that contains the information you want. Emails are sent via MTAs (mail transfer agents) from one PC to another. Each time it is sent it is date, time, subject, sender and recipient stamped.

This information can be retrieved using the IP address that is contained in the header part of the mail. Most headers are not always visible for most mails. At the same time there are various ways to view the header information of an email depending on the domain that is being used to send the mail. Once you know how to view the header information then you can take the IP address and search it on an IP address finder.

IP address finders will be able to tell you from where the mail was sent from using maps and geo locator's. This is probably one of the best ways of how to trace an email's origin. I have heard of people who have received news of sweepstakes winnings, tracked the email only to discover the senders were only interested in getting their banking details. Always check first before divulging private information.