IP address on an e-mail header

Factual Questions
1

I remember a few years ago using hotmail and gmail that the e-mails I sent would always arrive at destination with one of the headers reading “originating IP” followed by my IP address. Not really relevant, but just another fact, I have had a static IP address for years.

Lately I am receiving e-mail from friends who use gmail and I see that this header which indicates the actual origin of the email is not to be found. All the IP’s referenced in the e-mail are those of gmail itself.

Can anyone give me some insight into this?

2

WAG: Privacy concerns. From an IP address, anybody these days can figure out where the originator lives (at the neighbourhood level at least). Since the originating IP address had limited technical value for Web mail, GMail stopped including it.

I’m sure Google keeps it on file somewhere, though, in case Osama Bin Laden’s ghost uses GMail to send vague threats.

3

How does one get to the neighborhood level with an IP address? The closest you’ll get is the CO of the telco or the switch from the CableCo. Websites think I’m in Tustin, CA because that’s where Time Warner has their switch to the backbone. I’m more than 50 miles away.

4

I, too am curious.

5

There’s a lot of data in the world to be mined by interested parties – and there are certainly interested parties. Geolocation data sources probably vary by provider, but here are some potential ways to get more detailed information:

  • Buying it from internet service providers directly

  • Correlating it with user-supplied zipcodes (a site like Yelp could match patterns in IP addresses with patterns in zip code searches)

  • Buying marketing data from a third party (such as registration-required website that collects both zip codes and IP addresses from its subscribers)

  • Analyzing wireless data in actual vehicles (Google’s street view cars have been found to record network traffic as they drove by. If they wanted to, they could’ve associated IP address with current GPS location.)

  • Harvesting information from current location-based services (some location-aware software in computers and smartphones calculate their position by triangulating nearby WiFi hotspots, the location of which are known from previous drivebys; it’s possible that this same software reports back home to continually improve the service’s accuracy)

  • Criminal activity (Spyware networks, abusing employee privileges, hacking databases, etc.)

The quality of this data is, naturally, highly variable. Sometimes they can be right down to the city, sometimes they’re even in the wrong county.

6

As far as I recall, my ISP uses dynamic IP’s that are renewed (and changed) periodically.
If I had a static IP, I could host a server from my own computer. I can’t.
I am confused.

7

If you’re law enforcement (or otherwise have access to ISP logs), you can match dynamic IPs to timestamps and find your account that way.

Even if you’re just a marketer, dynamic IPs are usually assigned in a pattern – maybe everybody in City A gets 12.34.56.0 - 100 and everybody in City B gets 12.34.56.101-255, for example.

Again, geolocation quality varies wildly from one instance to another, but people do get caught sometimes (usually when their IP address comes from a big organization with their own network, like a corporation or a university that leases an IP range for an entire campus).

ETA: And you can indeed host a server from your own computer even with a dynamic IP, either by giving clients your latest IP address whenever you need to or by automating the process using dynamic DNS.

8

Dynamic DMS.
Duh.

And this, ladies and gentlemen is why I write applications and not network software.

9

WAG: your IP would only show up in the header if you use a client software on your computer, which then connected directly with an outgoing SMTP server; when you use a web based email like Gmail, your computer is not connecting directly to the SMTP server, only Gmail’s server is

10

With www.ipaddresslocation.org I can find my sister’s neighbourhood (longitude and latitude). For my office, I get a location about 5 km away. Both locations are in (different) urban areas in Québec, Canada, through different ISPs.

I was guessing it was that precise for everybody, but it probably depends on network topology. Apparently, in the United States, it doesn’t work that well with all ISPs.

11

True, but (as the OP said) services like GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo! mail used to include this information. They would insert into a message’s header a line specifying the IP address of the computer you used to access the Web page to compose the e-mail. This seems to have disappeared, in GMail’s case at least.

12

I tested my yahoo account in a different recent thread. Yahoo still puts the IP of the sender in the header.

13

i don’t see IP data in the new Yahoo mail implimentation.

14

I took a quick look in my mailbox, and found a few recent messages containing X-Originating-IP headers. They came from AOL - yeah, somebody I regularly receive email from uses AOL, and somebody forwarded something mailed originally from AOL. There may be a few more - I looked specifically at those emails because I figured if anybody did it, it would be AOL.