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How to trace the email sender?

Hard question for all that don’t know how to see the email headers. The purpose of this post is to show you and learn you what are the email headers. Email headers are lines that are attached to any email message you received and all email clients have them. For the public eye the headers are lines like: To, From, Date, and Subject but if you look close to most of the email clients you will find more details.

To show you how to see the rest of the headers I had done 2 email accounts: one with gmail and one with yahoo. (I chose this 2 because are some of the best providers of free email and also many of the people use it.)

Gmail

Yahoo

As you see in this picture (by the way I’m sorry because the quality of the pictures isn’t so good) from headers you can see if the message you have just received is spam or not or if is fake. If you want to track the original sender of the email you just need to pay attention to the headers. 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.

If you want to make a complaint for spam/scam/fraud through email just remember to include all the headers of the email along with an attached copy when filling a complaint. I hope this will help somebody.

Be safe