Tracing an Email

Yesterday I posted an article about tracing hackers that try to get in your system. Today I give you one about tracing an emails back to the original sender.
The first thing you have to do is to enable email headers. The site (no longer available, link removed) shows you how to do so using Gmail, Yahoo Mail and MSN Hotmail. All desktop clients should support this feature as well. Email Headers show you additional information about the email, for example the first server that received the email from the sender or IP addresses.
Here is an example of how to display headers on Gmail. Open the email that you want to check, and click on the small down arrow icon in the "from" line. A menu pops up, and you need to select "show original" from it to display all email headers.
After explaining how to configure your mail software to display email headers, the site explains the important headers in detail.This is necessary to understand how to use them to trace an email message back to its original sender. Finally the last part of the article shows you how to trace the sender looking upr the senders IP address on the Internet. Its again only helpful if the email was not relayed through botnets, cracked servers or other means of disguising the spammer's original IP address.
Update: You can enable all email headers in Mozilla Thunderbird the following way: Click on View > Headers > All. This should enable detailed headers that you can use to analyze where the email is coming from.
Once you have configured email headers, you need a basic understanding of what you should be looking for to use them effectively. What you basically need to understand is that the sender of an email is not sending it directly to you. The email instead is first send to the sender's email provider from where it is usually send through a number of servers before it reaches your email provider's server from where you can retrieve it in your email client.
To find the sender's IP address, you need to look for the header X-Originating-IP. If that header is not displayed, you need to look at the first received server to find the IP address of the sender. Keep in mind that the IP can still be fake, e.g. if a proxy was used.
Update 2: The original site is no longer available on the Internet, and we have removed the link pointing to it from this article as a consequence.
Advertisement
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!