Where Did That Email Come From?

An interesting new tool from the guys behind the controversial DidTheyReadIt?: LocationMail. (For some posts on DidTheyReadIt, check out here, here, here and here.)

LocationMail tells you where e-mail was sent from. It uses the most accurate data in the world to analyze your e-mail, trace it, and look up where the sender was when the message was sent. Find out where your friend was when she e-mailed you, or where a business contact is really writing from.

LocationMail integrates seamlessly into Outlook or Outlook Express; once installed, it shows you location information next to each message. LocationMail shows the City, State, Country, Company, ISP, and Connection Speed of the sender.

Installs painlessly into Outlook but crashed my Outlook Express. In Outlook a popup window appears with details of where the email was sent from, including the company, location, connection type, domain and IP address. LocationMail does this by using what it thinks is the IP address of the sender and running it through data from DigitalEnvoy and IP registrars. (A fuller explanation is here.) The makers hope to target a range of customers:

With phishing and other forms of Internet fraud becoming more and more problematic, LocationMail protects you from e-mail based frauds. The program can tell you if an email you seemingly received from your local bank was actually sent from a location half way around the globe. By instantly tracing the source of your emails, LocationMail helps keeps you safe from identify thieves. LocationMail lets you identify and eliminate fraudulent transactions from eBay and other Internet-based auction houses.

LocationMail protects companies who accept orders by email. Credit cards are regularly stolen from people in affluent countries, and used for placing online orders by criminals from other countries. By telling you an email’s origination location, the program helps you detect fraudulent inconsistencies.

Whether you’re a business person who wants to keep track of the demographics of prospects and customers, a manager who wants to ensure that incoming email addresses are legitimate and consistent, or a home computer user who is curious about where friends are e-mailing from, LocationMail has the tools that you need.

It costs $30. Another program that does something quite similar is eMailTrackerPro which will also identify the network provider of the sender, including contact information for abuse reporting, and uncovers the ‘misdirection’ tactic commonly used by spammers. Of course, LocationMail may not help that much, since legitimate emails might not, in Internet terms, originate from the place where they should. But it does a pretty good job and is useful if, say, you’re not sure about whether an email is spam or not (it does happen) the fact it originated in Seoul should provide a clue (unless you know lots of people in Seoul, of course).

And most importantly, this isn’t an invasive technology.