Hacking for beginners- IP addresses and IP tracing in Gmail

This post will cover the following points:
1.IP addresses.
2.IP tracing.
3.How to find the IP address of the sender in Gmail.

IP Tracing:-
IP tracing is said to be one of the most important steps in Hacking a remote system because it gives more information about the system, the host on which resides, the potential weaknesses in the system and so on.
Thus, the first step in attacking a system is the identifying and locating the target. For doing this we need to know the ip address of the system. This is where IP tracing comes into the picture.But before going into details, it is important to understand a few things about ip addresses.

IP Address:-
Every system connected to the internet has a unique address which is called IP address or the Internet Protocol address. Just like the address of your home tells the location the IP address tells the other systems about your location on network. Thus, an IP address identifies your system among the millions of systems connected to the net. Every data packet sent or recieved by your system contains your IP address.

The IP addresses are designed in such a way that you cannot predict the location of the system just by looking at its fields. So, if somebody tells you that the location(or country) of a system is decided, say, by its third field or second field then that is completely false. However there are many tools and sites available which tell you the geograpical information just by entering the ip address.

How to find the IP address of the sender in Gmail :
When you receive an email, you receive more than just the message. The email comes with headers that carry important information that can tell where the email was sent from and possibly who sent it.
Here are the steps.
1. Log into your Gmail account with your username and password.
2. Open the mail.
3. To display the headers,
* Click on More options corresponding to that thread. You should get a bunch of links.
* Click on Show original
4. You should get headers like this:
Gmail headers : Abcdxyz
Look for Received: from followed by a few hostnames and an IP address between square brackets.
example-180.120.60.22
That is be the IP address of the sender.
5. Track the IP address of the sender

Note that this will not work if the sender uses anonymous proxy servers.
Once you have the ip address you can trace it using ip tracing tools and websites.