In Gmail, how do I read the message headers?Dave, I've really been enjoying learning more about Google's Gmail system, and have found your Q&A articles invaluable assistance (especially the one about forwarding messages and the one about Gmail phishing notifications) but I'm still a bit puzzled about one thing: how do I see the headers to messages I receive? While Gmail ostensibly suffers from the same problem of any well-designed interface -- that it hides too much information from advanced users in the interest of offering the best possible experience to novices -- the good news is that it's very easy to dig into a given email message and learn more about its headers. Even better, you can easily add the message sender to your contacts list, forward or print the message, and much more, all with one click. The secret is the tiny little "More options" link that appears adjacent to the time and date that the message was sent on the header line. Let me show you what I mean, okay? Turns out that I'm going back and forth with Lexar support about a failing JumpDrive Secure USB keychain drive, and they finally approved my returning the unit for a replacement. A long story, but it just so happens that the message from Lexar is in my Gmail inbox, so here's how it looks when I view it: 
That'll probably look pretty familiar. But watch what happens when I click on the little "More options" button: 
That's where all the options are hiding in Gmail. Notice that you can reply to the sender, reply to everyone on the recipient list, forward, print, add sender to contacts list, trash this message, report phishing and... the last option... what you asked for: "Show original". Click on that link and you'll be shown the exact header of the message, including the Gmail-added header "X-Gmail-Received". I think that should address your issue. The moral of this little story? Poke around in Gmail and you'll be pleased and surprised at the many capabilities are hidden just one or two mouse clicks away.
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Never miss another useful Q&A article again! Subscribe to AskDaveTaylor with Google Reader. Dave, i read u're article on the GMAIL header thing.. But, i would like to ask u 1 thing..... The email headers in GMAIL do not show the email address and the ip of the person sending u the email.. isntead u get 1 message id with some shit like "abcdsfg123456djhgsjhg@gmail.com".... how in hell do u interpret that?? one friend of mine had played a nasty trick on me by sending me emails as another person for 8 months.. if he had sent his emails to my gmail account i would have never found out.... anything to say??? Posted by: Ridhish Guhan at March 9, 2005 8:25 AMI've been struggling with an attack from a series of fake gmail accounts. It would be useful to be able to find out the IP address used to send gmail email. Yahoo! puts this in the message-ID but AFAIK there's nothing in gmail headers. Can you tell me otherwise? Posted by: Julian Bond at March 9, 2005 11:07 AMRidhish, it sounds to me like you have a problem with someone spoofing a Gmail "from", not a problem with the Gmail system itself. I have seen no evidence that the system masks incoming addresses in any format and it'd be totally wacked for Gmail to do that anyway, wouldn't it? Sorry you're having a problem with spoofing, though. I wonder what would happen if you reported the spoofed email as 'phishing'... Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 9, 2005 1:42 PMJulian, I don't know if they only use one outbound system, but when I sent mail to myself from my Gmail account to my regular email address, here's what one of the headers showed: Received: from wproxy.gmail.com (wproxy.gmail.com [64.233.184.206]) Looks like 64.233.184.206 is what you seek. Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 9, 2005 1:46 PMExcellent Gmail article much appreciated Posted by: David Green at March 9, 2005 10:10 PMI notice that if you click the "Show original" link after choosing more options, you are shown the original, unformatted text of the message. Posted by: Steve Crane at March 10, 2005 9:06 AMExactly right, Steve! There's a lot that Gmail does right, as far as I can see... Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 10, 2005 2:24 PMguys, zats not what i was talking about.. julian got close to it.. dave u still didnt answer it.. u talked about the outgoing msgs.. what about the case when some1 emails u from say yahoomail. gmail doesnt show the ip address.. that doesnt make sense.. yahoo also implements the message id thing, but they do show the ip of the sender.. dave, to which acc(server-yahoo, rediff or what) did u send the mail from gmail.. that email server is showing the recipient u're ip.. try sending an email from say yahoo to gmail.. gmail wont show u're ip in the message header. peace....... Posted by: Ridhish Guhan at March 12, 2005 5:59 AMRidhish, I understand what you're asking, and it seems to me that the information is protected. I sent a message from my Yahoo Mail account to my Gmail account and when I viewed all the headers (as shown in the article, above; click on "show original"), one of those headers is: Received: from [67.173.203.115] by web52909.mail.yahoo.com via HTTP; Sun, 13 Mar 2005 06:53:26 PST As far as I can tell, the 67.173.203.115 is my system's IP address (actually the IP address of my router, since I've a local network that uses NAT to dole out separate IP addresses internally). When I sent this same message to my regular email address (not Gmail) that same header is retained. Does that answer your question? Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 13, 2005 2:59 PMdave, 1 last question.. does the ip showing thing work when its gmail to gmail.. thats what i noticed when i took a closer look at my mails.. it doesnt show the originating ip and all that.. sorry for bothering u for so long... :-)) Posted by: Ridhish Guhan at March 25, 2005 4:31 AMRidhish, theoretically the information is in messages from one Gmail account to another too. When I look at the header from a Gmail message sent from my colleague Andrew Goodman, it includes the following three lines: Received: by 10.54.47.42 with SMTP id u42cs41422wru; My experience with reading mail headers suggests that Received lines are always added above prior lines, so it's newest-to-oldest here, which means that the last of the three lines should pinpoint Andrew's IP address, 10.38.151.45. Posted by: Dave Taylor at March 25, 2005 5:03 AMDear Dave, Sorry for still having questions on this. According to your last message, it seems that Andrew's IP address is 10.38.151.45, but I think it's NOT. Most likely it's the IP of google's servers. Because: I sent an email to myself from gmail to another address. In that email, the last Received line is: Received: by 10.54.101.12 with HTTP; Fri, 15 Apr 2005 19:37:46 -0700 (PDT) But 10.54.101.12 is NOT my ip. My Ip starts with 69.... but it wasn't anywhere in the header of email starting from gmail.com. If that's the case, then is it true that there is NO way to find out the real ip of the sender? Thanks, Crt Posted by: Crt at April 16, 2005 3:56 AMYou might be right then, Crt. Anyone else have any ideas or insight about whether Gmail messages are anonymous or not? Posted by: Dave Taylor at April 16, 2005 6:34 AMHi, Yes this is right, but it should be the IP of the ISP he / she is currently using, then from there its a little harder to track down the computers IP. Try the different IP's at this site http://arul.telenet-systems.com/track.html Hi to all - - This is about IP address in GAMIL It is under more options - -tiny little link. I have pasted below the details of "Email Header" of my message - - under this you will find senders IP address which in case below is - - - - "Received: from moonfish.no.com (82.98.209.31) An address starting with 10.?.?.? is an internal network IP. Dave (i think it was) gave his ip but said that it was his networks id which was distributed by NAT. NAT assigns IPs from the 10.?.?.? range and 192.168.?.? range. When you look at the header of a gmail, the received from IP is in the vicinity (msp) of 10.35 10.36 10.54 10.70 among others. This means that that the last frame/packet that was added the data was done by a gmail internal network. Posted by: himay at February 25, 2006 1:09 AMyou can check your external ip with sites www.showip.com if ur under nat and check the ip address of web sites at www.dnsstuff.com GMAIL is masking outgoing message headers. In the last few months we have been experiencing an increase in malicious email from @gmail.com. All the headers "Blackhole" IPs in the 10. range ... including internal range 192... which just ends up IDing gmail proxy servers. This is very alarming and really I can't understand how this is allowed to be. To trace a message from Gmail would require allot of work such as contacing Google which would be a real pain in the ass. At this point, we are considering banning all incoming email from @gmail.com accounts. Either Google is going to get with it or they will see more and more bans from private email networks. Posted by: Prof. Reichsmarschall Schmidt at March 17, 2006 4:43 PMHi: Re: Gmail and IP addresses: I have been researching this at length lately and what I have come up with is that all gmail ips are anonymous. Listed as private. There is a website called www.ip2location.com that will give you the general address of an ip. But gmail users are listed as a private address. I do have a question though. I recieved an email from a friend last week from yahoo. But I suspected that my friend didn't send it, rather someone else went into my friend's account and sent it from their own computer. So I am thinking that the ip address would come from their computer and not my friend's right? And are IPs the computer address or the email server of that computer?? Posted by: pamela at May 13, 2006 11:59 AMAccording to this article, google hides the ipaddress for outbound mail. "Personal information, including someone's exact location, can be gathered from someone's IP address, so Gmail doesn't reveal this information in outgoing mail headers." Link: http://chris-linfoot.net/plinks/CWLT-6HYCYN
All of this information was a good read. Darn it anyway Gmail! I received threats to my Gmail account from another Gmail account and I have no idea how to find out who did it, since the headers are all these begin with 10.?.?.?.? etc. I used to think Gmail was really a nice idea. Now I am really mad at them. Posted by: ThreatenedBySum1UsingGmail at December 7, 2006 10:04 PMIT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO IDENTIFY THE SENDER'S IP FROM AN EMAIL SENT VIA GMAIL FROM THE HEADERS Posted by: Mike at February 11, 2007 12:32 PMI just come accross with the same problem. So, I think you people already have done a lot of efforts since March 2005, so I shouldn't waste my time to think about Gmail header. I should track his IP with some other tricks. Posted by: Zeeshan at February 19, 2007 10:09 PMIf you want ALL of the information from an email in GMAIL, click the button that says "Show Original." This should give you several different IP addresses, including the sender's. Hope this helps, The Aardvark aardvark.novelista@gmail.com Posted by: The Aardvark at June 3, 2007 11:14 PMHi Dave, I just came across this series of questions regarding Googlemail / gmail and wanted to write with a query. A good friend of mine has been experiencing online harassment and stalking. Today, she received an email entitled "Keep your friends close..... Your enemies closer....!" She is understandably concerned and forwarded the email and message header for me to look at. However, I am unable to locate the sender's IP address in the header provided below. Can you shed any light on this for me? I have no trouble with any other email clients, but this one has me perplexed. I've blocked out the recipient's email address for the obvious reasons. Is this header spoofed or the real thing and how can I locate the IP address? Thanks in advance for any help. Return-Path: I'm curious: Do you know how to search in your Gmail account for an IP address? I have an IP address that was used in an unkind manner, and I'm guessing it was done by one of my acquaintances -- which would mean that I'd have an email from them somewhere in my account. Is there any way I can search all my messages for that IP address? (I tried plugging it into the search field, but no go.) Posted by: Tim at June 12, 2007 7:30 PMcan gmail header can provide us email password... not only gmail header but for all mails
softwares in PC like out look, incredi mail; I don't see what you see when you're looking at a message in Gmail. I was looking for Ip address of my friend in gmail through a mail sent by her.But the problem is tho i cud get "more options" link and "show details" option also,the pop-up window which opens up dont give any IP address of the sender.It just says: now here i cant see any "Received :from" option. Can u help me? Posted by: anonymous at December 31, 2007 2:43 AMDoes any one know how to either hide the dates in gmail or not be able to view the show details options in gmail. Posted by: lou at January 1, 2008 6:16 PMHi, I would like to know about the sender's ip address if the sender is using gmail account. How can i check that. I have a similar problem: If i have received an email from your friend, how can you tell whether it is spoofed or not Posted by: hemant .singh at April 28, 2008 11:50 PMI have a lot to say, but ...
I do have a comment, now that you mention it!
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