How to find the IP address of the email sender in Microsoft Outlook

In a previous post, I have shown How to find the IP address of the email sender in Yahoo! Mail. Now, let’s see how to find the email sender if you are using Microsoft Outlook. This is useful if someone is flooding your inbox with junk mail or harassing you via email.

Important! You will not be able to find the real IP address if the sender uses an anonymous proxy server.

Here is what you have to do to get the IP address of an email sender in Microsoft Outlook:

1. Start Microsoft Outlook
2. Open a message (Double click on message header in order to open it in a window)
3. On the View menu, click Options
4. Under the Delivery options in the Internet Headers box you can see the mail header information.

In order to determine the IP address of the sender, you have to take a look to the Received: Headers. These Headers Received Headers have the following format:

Received: from [computer name and/or IP address from sender]
         by [server name] (maybe Internet protocol too); date. 

Sample:
Received: from 088156106043.stk.vectranet.pl [88.156.106.205] by web41013.mail.yahoo.com with SMTP; Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:44:26 -0700

This means that the server web41013.mail.yahoo.com received the message from the IP address 88.156.106.205 on the Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:44:26 -0700 via SMTP.

Then, after you find out the IP address of the sender you just have to use a location lookup service (GeoBytes IP Locator or IP2Location) to find the exact location (country, city, etc) of the sender. In order to understand better how to use a lookup service, you should also read: Tracking the location of an IP address.

Do you have questions, comments, or suggestions? Post a comment!