If you were to do a Google search for the term “Track Email,” you will find a lot of search results for products, services, guides and tutorials showing you how to decipher the illegible jargon that technical support specialists seem to love, better known as Email Headers.
Email headers are blocks of text that contains details about the message, including the sender’s information, the recipient’s information, the servers that handled the message as it traveled from the sender to the recipient, etc.
By default, many email clients do not display the header information, and for good reason. A lot of that header information is meaningless to the user, all they really need is the contents of the email. However, when you need to get more information about an error message, or when you just want to find out where an email came from, the email headers are an invaluable tool to uncovering general information about the issue.
We covered how to extract an email’s header information in an earlier post; here we want to focus on how to extract useful information from those headers. A good, basic tool that you can use to get information from email headers can be found over at whatismyipaddress.com.
Using it is very simple: paste your email headers into the text box and click the “Get Source” button. A new window will load showing the header information separated into rows in a table as well as Geo-Location Information, Geo-Location Map and Whois information about the IP address it was sent from. It looks something like this.
While you won’t get a lot of detail – a deeper understanding of how to read header information is needed to track transport of emails in-depth – this is an easy method to getting some useful information from headers.
