E-mail messages are forwarded to the recipient through a chain of web servers connected to the Internet. In the global network, such data transmission is impossible without using the network addresses of all servers participating in the "relay race". According to RFC standards - Request for Comments - for email messages, along with the contents of the letter, only a few ip-addresses reach the recipient, but they are the sender's servers. This allows you to determine the network addresses of the senders of incoming mail.
Instructions
Step 1
Use the information contained in the RFC headers of incoming enail messages to determine the IP address of the sender's mail server. With the default settings, these headers do not display either the mail clients installed on the computer, or the mail service sites located on the Internet. To see them, you need to use additional settings. For example, in The Bat mail program, open the "View" section in the menu and select the "Show headers (RFC-822)" item. And in the mail client Microsoft Outlook Express, open the required message, then open the "File" section in the menu and select the "Properties" line. Look for RFC headers on the "Details" tab of the window that opens.
Step 2
In the interfaces of mail services, access to these headers is also organized in different ways. If you use Gmail, open the text of the desired message, open the drop-down list next to the button to reply to the letter and click on the line "Show original". To access headers in the Mail.ru mail service, use the "Service headers" item in the drop-down list with the name "More". In the interface of the Yandex mail server, having opened the message, find the "Additional" section in the menu and select the "Mail properties" item. In Yahoo mail, having loaded the text of the message into the page, click on the third button from the right in its header - the button depicts a gear. In the drop-down list, select the "Full title" item.
Step 3
Once you access the RFC headers, look for the lines that start with Received - usually there are several. Each line must contain the name of the mail server, its ip-address and time. By time, determine the very first mail server that received a message from the sender - its ip and can be considered the address of the sender's email server. However, one should not forget about the existence of proxy servers, which make it easy to disguise the true network address of the sender's mail service.
