IP Tracking Tool - A Necessity These Days to Trace Location of Received Emails

These days the requirement of IP tracking tool has become a necessity and the main motive of this article is to devise suitable methods to track IP addresses of received emails. The reason being that the necessity to track IP address especially of received emails has shown a high rise and this cannot be done manually without any tool. However, an individual can track his/ her own IP address on a PC by executing the ‘ipconfig’ command in the command prompt window. On doing this, the IP address gets displayed on the command prompt screen. But before we get into the details of IP tracking tool to trace IP Address, let us learn what IP Address is.

Definition of IP Address

An Internet Protocol address, popularly known as an IP address is a type of logical address that comprises of unique numerical values. The current version being used is IPv4 and is a 32-bit number though IPv6, which is an advanced version comprises of 64-bit. It is assigned to all the entities like PCs, printer, Mac system, etc. connected to a network that utilizes Internet Protocol for communication. Even emails and websites also have IP addresses associated with them. It exhibits two chief functions; first is identification of host or network interface while the second is location addressing. 

What is IP Tracking?

As tracking is a process of locating things or persons, in the same way IP tracking is nothing but tracing of Internet Protocol addresses. As emails and websites are also linked with IP, once IP gets tracked, it becomes easy to trace the physical location of host from where emails have been sent. However, the word ‘IP Tracking’ itself signifies as to what it aims at and definitely a tool is required for it.

Necessity of Tracking Email IP Address

One of the necessities to track email IP addresses is that one is getting abusive, insulting, violent, cruel mails from somebody and he/ she or investigators want to know where it has come from to collect evidences. Especially this would help forensic investigators to locate the unknown locations of sender.

How to Track Received Emails?

To track location of received emails from a particular sender it first becomes necessary to track the IP address associated with the emails and then the IP Address can be traced to find out the physical location by gaining information such as Internet Service Provider (ISP), country’s location, region, etc. of the sender. So, a complete process of IP tracking to trace emails requires two steps as mentioned below:

1.  First, is to attain IP Address associated with any particular email and this requires an external IP tracking tool.
2. Secondly, the attained IP address should be traced so as to find out the physical host address from where a person might have sent mails. The free online applications like IP Address Tracker available at www.ip-tracker.org, www.iptrackeronline.com, etc can be used to find out the ISP, country, region and other important details. 

In Outlook, the following process should be followed to locate the IP Address:

Step 1: Open the desktop mail client and then the email message as per want.

Step 2: On the Message tab, in the Options group, click the ‘Dialog Box Launcher’ as shown in the figure below.

Step 3: On doing this, in the Message Options dialog box, all the header information appears in the ‘Internet headers’ box shown in red rectangle in the figure below. In this box, the IP address is located.

Finally, in this way, users can locate the email IP Address.

Conclusion - If users want to employ the above explained method they can or the other method is to make using various email forensic tool in the market. Once executed it provides preview of emails in various forms. Out of all preview options; Message Header View or Email Hop view in the tab Email view can be selected to find out the logical 32-bit IP Address of the host from where emails are sent. Read more