Tracing Emails

[admarlow]

Is it posiable to trace which country an email has been sent from?

[jake-the-peg]

Not reliably.

You can view the mail headers which tells you the domain name and you can find ou where that's registerred to but there are a lot of "open relays" out there that will allow someone to completely disguise their origin.

There are other techniques too but I won't go into the details.

It might not even be reliable if the mail is "honest" I might be on a business trip and only have modem phone line access. I might make a call via my company system and the mail would appear to come from there despite me being potentially thousands of miles away

[OBonio]

As JTP mentions, each email has headers which contain various information. Sometimes, these headers contain each SMTP server that the email went through to arrive at your inbox. Some SMTP servers known as anonymisers remove this information though, and the problem of open relays can mask some originators IPs. That said though, it's worth having a look. In Outlook, right click the email and select Options. At the bottom are the Internet headers. You need this sort of info :

Received: (qmail 18933 invoked from network); 17 May 2007 14:10:56 -0000
Received: from astro.systems.pipex.net (HELO astro.systems.pipex.net) (62.241.163.6)
by server-13.tower-174.messagelabs.com with SMTP; 17 May 2007 14:10:56 -0000
Received: from [127.0.0.1] (81-179-118-78.dsl.pipex.com [81.179.118.78])
by astro.systems.pipex.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6870FE0002F0;
Thu, 17 May 2007 15:03:20 +0100 (BST)

The last entry could could be the address of the originator, and as each country has its own alotted IP ranges, you can hazard a guess based on that. In this case, 81.179.118.78, which, according to here, is in London, England.

[OBonio]

Actually, the originator was from Swindon, England... but at least it got the country right :o).