Can GMail be traced?

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There's no way to confirm much of anything about the IP without the help
of the ISP that owns it, and they'll likely insist you have some legal
reason (court order, police, whatever) before they'll help you.

There's no way to know in general if a place of work - or any place for
that matter - keeps a log of what's happening. You'd have to speak to
the IT department, or whomever handles the IT for that place of work.

Leo
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Take a look at www.didtheyreadit.com
The idea is very simple, you send a mail to them, they send it to the recipient, including an invisible image (which resides on didtheyreadits server), as soon as the recipient opens the mail the recipients IP-address is logged and send to you by mail... that does the trick, it's completely transparent...
You could otherwise set up a free website (which has IP logging available to you) and put some image on it. Then just hotlink to that image in your email... You can then pick up the IP-address from your referrer-stats...

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These days that technique works very INfrequently. I've heard stats as
high as it working less than 50% of the time, but in my experience it's
much MUCH less.

Most people have remote images disabled, and that's what this technique
relies on. Since you can't control what people do in their mailers, it's
still the case that there is no reliable way to determine if someone's
opened your email.

Leo
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I can just say it works for me, and I can't see why it shouldn't work for anybody else.
Mostly I include an image myself, then the recipient will almost certainly enable display for the message...
the stats are bullcrap, there's no such thing as stats for this matter... i agree that if you use the didtheyreadit service you rely on them, otherwise the other option is working great.
have you tried this yourself?

Tis person created this email id and then sent a message to the whole organization spreading how bad is this person Intan... Do you have any ways to track who is this person? Where and what time?

[email address removed]

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No. If it warrents it you'd have to involve the police and get them to get
Google to help you.

Leo
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I disagree completely with your argument that someone who sends an email to me has a right to keep their originating IP address private.

Anyone who communicates with me is making themselves known to me. Their IP address is part of their identity and so is not private at that point. If they don't want me to know, then they should not communicate with me.

In fact, gmail is a liability to Google for the very fact that it is a great tool for sleaze bags. You can't track originating IP addresses from gmail senders. That news will get out to child predators, fraudsters and bullies -- and probably is already.

Have you ever tried to get a response from Google for any customer service issue? Try doing it if you have a concern that your child is being preyed upon by a pedophile. You'll be desperate to know, but you'll have to wait weeks, months, years even to get help from Google.

That's ridiculous, especially because in most cases doing a quick lookup of an originating IP address could immediately put your mind at ease. MSN Hotmail and Yahoo Mail capture the originating IP addresses in most cases.

I've just had personal experience with a case like this involving gmail, where I had to use the "image trick" to capture the IP of someone I thought was a predator preying on my daughter. For two days, the stress of not knowing was awful. When I got the orginating IP by tricking the sender into clicking on an image link, I was able to find out that the "predator" was just a girl who had opened a gmail account in a fake name and was masquerading as a guy.

But I realized that this is a problem, a flaw in Gmail. Privacy has nothing to do with it. If you send an email to someone, you're telling them who you are and they have a right to check that you are who you say.

Don't mix this up with the right to keep your private web activities private. The two are most definitely not the same.

I'm a big privacy advocate, but I learned that thinking simplistically is dangerous.

Google does not display the originating IP addresses and does not allow them to be sent. this is why spammers love Gmail

There is also another case you maybe should have mentioned: web-based email-services like gmail that is handled via a local client like Outlook. Turns out that mails sent this way does add the senders IP.

Of course you did say that about local clients, but you only associate gmail with the web-based kind, so one might get away with the impression that gmail is safe, when in fact it isn't always.

Also, the original question doesn't specify whether he's talking about using gmail via the web or not (technically you 'log on' to the gmail account in either case.) That may also be the reason for the conflicing answers he had gotten -- one was talking about using the web-interface and the other a local client.

Whops, just saw on the first page that my point have already been covered in the comments. Maybe you should add "read all comments" to the list of things to do before commenting. : )

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