Mail disclosure, reveal email sender from Gmail

When you receive an email, you receive more than just the message. The email comes with headers that carry important information that can tell where the email was sent from and possibly who sent it. For that, you would need to find the IP address of the sender. The tutorial below can help you find the IP address of the sender.

Note that this will not work if the sender uses anonymous proxy servers.

Also, note that if you receive an email sent from a Gmail account through the web browser, you may not be able to find the real IP address because Google hides the real IP address of the sender. However, if someone sends you a mail from his/her Gmail account using a client like Thunderbird, Outlook or Apple Mail, you can find the originating IP address.

Lets begin this. First of all, the IP address is generally found in the headers enclosed beween square brackets, for instance, [129.130.1.1]


1. Log into your Gmail account with your username and password.
2. Open the mail.
3. To display the email headers,

* Click on the inverted triangle beside Reply. Select Show Orginal.

4. Look for Received: from followed by the IP address between square brackets [ ].