E-mails are anonymous by nature - but contains significant information in its header about the path it traversed before reaching your mailbox. The header is normally not visible. We have discussed how to view and analyze header of any e-mail and locate actual sender with his/her IP address. In this issue - we shall discuss how to locate sender's country from IP address.

Internet Resources for IP Analysis

There are various free and paid-for Internet resources to help you find information about IP addresses, domain names etc.

1. VisualWare

Perhaps the leader in IP tracking software, Visualware has number of products to track e-mail, IP, domain name owner etc.

VisualRoute and eMailTrackerPro are two software from Visualroute that can help you significant information on e-mails.

VisualRoute has a free service to demonstrate how the software works. If your IP tracking requirement is modest - you may use this free service to track any IP address. However, if you wish to use this facility regularly - please consider buying the software.

To use the free service - please visit Visualware web-site http://www.visualware.com/index.html

Click on 'Online demos' button on above page - you will reach http://www.visualware.com/demo/index.html

Click on 'VisualRoute' link on above page and you will reach IP Tracking area - http://visualroute.visualware.com/

There is a simple one-step registration process that requires your e-mail address only. Enter your e-mail address in registration box - an identification number (called PIN) will be sent to your e-mail. Use this PIN for first time - you will not require it again.

After registration - copy and paste any IP number and it will immediately show the country of origin of the IP number on world map.

2. DNS Stuff

My favourite - this is a very powerful yet completely free service that does dozens of extremely useful functions. Internet is truly a marvelous place - where else would you find such high quality service completely free of cost ?

This does not even require registration - please visit http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and perform dozens of IP and DNS related functions.

To trace geographic location of an IP address - please use Tracert (Traces the route packets)

3. American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)

An excellent free source for finding information on IP number. To use this service, please visit http://www.arin.net/whois/index.html . Enter the IP into the search text box and hit "Submit". If the IP address belongs to an organization in North America or sub-Saharan Africa it will display the details of owner of the IP address.

For organizations located outside ARIN's geographical area of responsibility - here are other resources

• RIPE (European Registry): http://www.ripe.net/ripencc/pub-services/db/whois/whois.html


• APNIC (Asia Pacific Registry): http://www.apnic.net/apnic-bin/whois2.pl


• LACNIC (Latin America and the Caribbean Registry): http://lacnic.net/cgi-bin/lacnic/whois?lg=EN

To determine in which geographical area a particular country is located, see the List of Countries in Regional Registry Geographical Areas at http://www.arin.net/library/internet_info/countries.html

4. NetGeo - The Internet Geographic Database

NetGeo is a free service for locating geographical position of an IP address. Though this free service is almost as good as Visualware - much of its functionality is now lost as its database is not updated regularly.

You may find more information about NetGeo at http://www.caida.org/tools/utilities/netgeo/

To use this facility - please visit http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and use NetGeo IP Lookup

Above is a list of selected Internet resources, there are many others. I hope this is sufficient to meet your expectations. In case you need more - please feel free to suggest. I look forward to your comments, feedback and suggestion