How do I figure out if an IP address on an incoming message is from out of the country?

Question

I am exchanging pen-pal emails with someone in another country (supposedly), but my cynical, paranoid husband thinks I'm being "set up" by a stalker. I know I need to be careful and safe, but I'm just not as paranoid as he is. I used the "Full Header" feature on Yahoo mail, to get the IP address, but it's just a bunch of numbers. How can I find out what they mean? Or is there another simple way to find out where the messages originate, to prove to my husband that this person is not just down the block, leering at my body!! LOL!

Thank you BladeCrimson & SparrowNight -- but while I know some computerese, "PING" is beyond me! What do I use to "PING" something? And the tracer just gave me more numbers before it timed out. BTW, this is a great learning experience, too!

Ooops, that should have been SparrowNightmare!

Answer 1

http://network-tools.com/

Answer 2

Just admit to your husband that you cant stand him and you would rather chat with this " foreign" person, like you really care if they are far away or next door, let's face it , your husband doesn't want you chatting with some guy, you could in theory have an affair with, so if you can prove he is in another country then it's all cool, so just come up with some Cooky evidence that he is really far away, like have an email in a foreign language and such, use a converter on google. Have the dude take his picture in front of the Eiffel tower, or other landmark ,etc.. holding todays newspaper and send it to you, could be a chick, that's what they have hostages do.

Answer 3

Go to start and run, type in command. Hit enter. At the command line type in...

tracert (the IP address without brackets)

hit enter. This will show you the route that data has to take to get from your system to whatever the other system is. It will also give you the name of the host computer at the other end which you can use to do a whois lookup on. to do that go to www.whois.net and type in the domain name of the remote system (just the last to segments of the hostname, like microsoft.com or yahoo.com, not the full name like ask.yahoo.com.

That will tell you who owns the site as well as other registration info for it.

Answer 4

It is virtually impossible through email, without access to the ISP server database. It may be possible to determine the origination gateway I.P. address from the email header and ping that address. You will first want to ping your own gateway I.P. then ping the emails origination gateway I.P. and compare the ping times, Out of the country ping times should be more then 50milliseconds.