Is It Possible to Trace Gmail?
The sweet and short answer to your question is no, but of course the reality is more of a grey area. To lengthen the answer a little, there is no easy and sure fire way to find out the origin of a gmail sent email, but there are some means, and of course always the possibility for sleuthing online.
Why is it not possible to trace Gmails?
The reason it isn’t easy to find the source of an email from gmail is because, unlike most ISPs and email providers, gmail does not include the originating IP in the headers of the email. When viewing an email, these headers are usually not displayed, but with the required intervention in your email client or on your wemail providers web site, usually with the single click fo a button, it is possible to display them for the email in question. Look for an option like “View Headers”.
When looking at the headers you will be looking for a specific line. The originating ip header can vary by name but is usually suffixed by “-IP”, so from AOL, it is referenced as “X-Aol-Ip”, from other email clients it might look like “X-Originating-Ip”. If you are less lucky you might have to go reading through the “Received” part of the headers which gives you the chain of email servers and transactions enacted in order for the email to be sent a received.
In any event GMAIL doesn’t provide this, whether the user emails via HTTP or SMTP, but even if Google did, it wouldn’t provide the smoking gun, because an IP could just be from a block or IP-range that doesn’t necessarily pinpoint anything specifically. In a worst case scenario it will tell you nothing, in a better instance you might be able to deduce the hometown of the user, or in a best case scenario the IP might be assigned to them or the business they are working for. All potentially useful info.
Methods For Tracing Gmails
By way of trying to get the originating IP you can always try and use such means as replying to sender and including an attached image, hosted on your own web servers, that when loaded would produce a web log entry, which you can then hunt down. This is in itself a bit convoluted. Getting the same kind of information from Google or any other web site for that matter would be nigh on impossible, and would require a warrant of sorts from the police.
A better means would be more social engineering, and that would be to do a search through Google for the Gmail users name. A hunt for a email username such a “wineandthecity” might produce a plethora of results some of which would be pertinent, and when tied in with whatever information and general common sense about the user you know, can score a hit with useful information.
People are generally lazy or stupid and do leave a trail that can be picked up. Two instances spring to mind from my own personal experience. One is hate mail sent to a company worked at. With nothing more than a username from an email address and a awful lot of sleuthing, discussion and common sense we were able to come up with the name and details of the guy based in NYC who was making nothing more than an idiot out of himself. The second instance was an ex of mine who posted chats between her and her then ex online, for whatever reason, and which i then found.
Tracking Down The Offender
And so there it is, there are means by which to find people who send emails, and sometimes they take a lot of time, energy and common sense, but ultimately users, unless trying hard, can be tracked down. Gmail doesn’t make it easy, but then isn’t that half the fun?
