I received an email from someone and he knows about me personally and that he calls me by the name my friends call me. I'm not sure ho to track it but how do i know his location?
if he is using a vpn, how do i know if he is using vpn?
like chefkoch is saying, there are companies specialised in making lists of names and emails... They're pretty good to, so they can actually make you doubt the fact that they're spamming.
If you really want to investigate, look at the full headers of the email, look at "Received: from". At least you'll know the ip address of the mailserver that sent the email... You can plug it in into a geolocator and look at where the originating server was.
Offcourse, it's perfectly possible for somebody from the UK to be using a mailserver in china, but you'll never know... So it's basically impossible to tell where the sender is located (unless he's a incompetent spammer and is using his home PC to send out these mails... But those chances are really slim)
All in all, it's probably just best to either ignore the mail, or reply and ask where you know this person from. It's easy to know if their reply is bogus or not...
seen like from another city in our country.
if he is using just his home pc but using vpn, will i still know where his location is base on the full headers of the email?
Well... The headers show which server sent the mail and which server received it.
If, for example, he is using gmail and the mail was sent to your hotmail account, the headers will show google's ip as "received from", and microsoft's ip as "received by". There is no way of getting the individual's ip anyways...
But, like i said, if he's running an email server from his own private residence (very small chance, usually people use a mail service, or rent a VPN or dedicated box to send mails from), his private ip will show up, unless this server is using a VPN... In that case it's the VPN server's ip you'll find in the mail headers...
If there was something illegal in this mail, you can, however, look at the "received from" header, and contact the organisation that owns this ip address... Foreward them the email and tell them that one of their users sent you something illegal.
Normally the organisation that owns the mailserver should have logs showing the ip address of the individual user (unless he only contacted the mailserver over VPN).
Chances are slim that a company like google will actually give you the IP address of one of their users, i think you'll have to go trough law enforcement. They'll probably have to get a warrant, and then ask for the ip address of the sender...
If he only used a VPN, you can still contact the VPN provider, but most of them have a "no logs" policy, so it's a longshot.
