How to Find the Sender’s Location in Gmail

when John sends an email message to Elizabeth, the IP address of the sender (John's computer) is included in the header of the outgoing email message. The receiver (Elizabeth) can then perform a simple geo-lookup against that IP address to find the approximate geographic location of the message sender.

Both Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail include IP addresses in outgoing message headers but if John is sending an email address using Gmail, or Gmail for Google Apps, his IP address won't be included in the message.

IP addresses can be considered sensitive information. As such, Gmail may hide sender IP address information from outgoing mail headers in some circumstances.

If the IP address of John is not available, because he is sending email using Gmail, how can Elizabeth determine John's geographic location? There two options:

Option A: Gmail may include the IP Address

Gmail doesn't include the IP address of the sender when the sender is using Gmail's web interface to send email. However if he or she is using a desktop client (like Microsoft Outlook) or a mobile device to send that email, the IP address is often included in the outgoing message.

Open the message in Gmail, click on More – > Show Original and search for the line "Received: from " – it may have the IP address of the sender that you can map to a physical location with the help of Wolfram Alpha.

Option B: Find the Sender's Time Zone

When the IP address is not available, you can determine the sender's very-approximate location from the time-zone of the originating computer. Go your Gmail Labs page and enable the "Sender Time Zone" feature.

Now open any message in Gmail and click on the down arrow that says "Show details". The message will display the the current time in the sender's time zone as shown in the following screenshot.