TRACING E-MAIL

 

Welcome to (HACKING begins - "An approach to introduce people with the truth of HACKING"), Hello friends today in my article I'll tell you how can you you trace your e-Mail's on Internet but before starting i Just want to ask something from you....

• Are you receiving abusive e-mails from unknown people?
• Are you being blackmailed or threatened through e-mail?
• Are your children receiving e-mails filled with adult contents?

Now you can solve all these questions with little understanding of E-MAIL tracing. Most modern day Internet user uses standard e-mail clients like Opera, Microsoft outlook, Outlook Express etc to send or receive e-mail messaging on the Internet. It is extremely important for Internet users to understand how e-mail travel on the Internet.
All e-mails communications on the Internet is governed by rules or regulation, which is sub divided into two different protocols:

• SMTP (SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL)  (Port 25)
• POP (POST OFFICE PROTOCOL) (Port 110)

The SMTP protocol is used to send e-mails, while POP protocol is used to receive e-mails.
Generally, the path taken by an email while traveling from sender to receiver can be explained by following diagram.

E-MAIL HEADERS                                                             
The most effective & easier way to trace an e-mail is to analyze its headers. Most cyber crime investigators turn to e-mail headers for evidence in any kind of e-mail related crime. E-MAIL headers are automatically generated and embedded into an e-mail message both during composition & transfer between system. A typical e-mail header looks something like this:

To read the e-mail header you have to start reading it from bottom, there are several puzzle pieces which you have to solve. In example or for simple understanding divide the e-mail header into 2 part:

This part of header tell you the e-mail sent from Sahil Mahajanto sahilmahajan91@gmail.com with Subject: HACKING begins on Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2011 06:01:57, MESSAGE ID is very useful part of e-mail, many crime investigation companies use this ID code to solve cases.
In another part of the email header is very critical portion of the e-mail, which contains the sensitive information about the path traveled by e-mail. bottom to up rule is implemented to read this part of e-mail.

Received: from [218.248.64.165] by web120406.mail.ne1.yahoo.com via HTTP; Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:01:57
This is the last received line in the email header their we examine in above picture, it shows that someone using the IP [218.248.64.165], this is the source system from which the e-mail is delivered to mail server, trace this IP address and you can easily find the Sender from which you receives the fake or  abusive e-mails. Tracing e-mails have many faces but due to some security reason we cant reveal them but by simply following this method you can easily detect any unknown sender who send you fake mails....