Server locations

treehgr1

New Email
Is there a way to find out where (City, State) a Yahoo email server is located or which one an email was processed through? I would assume there are several based throughout the US.
 

EQ Admin

EQ Forum Admin
Staff member
Hello,

Yes, through a combination of checking the full email headers and doing some traceroutes you should be able to figure out the general region that a mail server is located in. For example this header is taken form an email sent by xbox / Microsoft to a Yahoo account :

Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO mta.engage.xbox.com) (66.231.81.127)
by mta1056.mail.ac4.yahoo.com with SMTP; Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:49:04 -0700

Usually a traceroute will give you some clue about the City and State from the reverse DNS names :

9 64-129-26-253.static.twtelecom.net (64.129.26.253) 39.522 ms 39.346 ms 38.908 ms
10 nyc2-pr2-xe-0-2-0-0.us.twtelecom.net (66.192.243.234) 42.276 ms 40.064 ms 40.280 ms
11 ae-1-d190.pat2.dax.yahoo.com (216.115.104.120) 162.803 ms 45.913 ms 46.023 ms
12 xe-7-0-0.msr1.ac2.yahoo.com (216.115.108.125) 45.988 ms xe-9-0-0.msr1.ac2.yahoo.com (216.115.108.141) 45.687 ms xe-2-0-0.msr1.ac2.yahoo.com (216.115.108.123) 45.774 ms
13 xe-9-2-0.clr3.ac4.yahoo.com (72.30.96.9) 45.919 ms xe-2-2-0.clr3.ac4.yahoo.com (72.30.96.1) 45.827 ms xe-2-2-0.clr4.ac4.yahoo.com (72.30.96.5) 46.552 ms
14 te-9-1.bas2-2-prd.ac4.yahoo.com (76.13.1.129) 46.329 ms te-9-1.bas1-2-prd.ac4.yahoo.com (76.13.1.127) 46.098 ms 45.675 ms
15 mta1056.mail.ac4.yahoo.com (67.195.168.120) 45.836 ms 46.157 ms 47.298 ms


;; ANSWER SECTION:
mta1056.mail.ac4.yahoo.com. 1800 IN A 67.195.168.120


That traceroute didn't have what I was looking for so I tried one of the IP geo location services and came up with Virginia.

Richmond, VA might be the right answer, or it could be based off of the registration information for the network block.
 
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