How Do I Find Out Who An IP Address Belongs To?

You might need to determine who an IP address belongs to for a variety of reasons. You might need to know for your business, or you might need to know for personal reasons. If you are worried about a website’s content, you might want to contact the local authorities about an individual. Regardless, it’s useful to know how to find out who owns an IP address.

The IP address will be a number that is split into four sections and each section is separated by a period. The entire number may be anywhere from four digits to twelve digits long.

You can find out who an IP address belongs to by using IP address lookup websites.

1. Use a search engine to determine the URL of a website that looks up IP addresses.
2. Enter the IP address in the form that the website designates.
3. Submit it to the website. 

The website will then give you the results of your search, and it will tell you the owner of the IP, or the business which owns that particular IP. 

Looking Up an IP Address From an E-mail

The steps for looking up an IP address from an e-mail are a little more complicated, but basically the same.

1. Open the e-mail that you want to research.
2. Find the e-mail header. The e-mail header is a combination of code that tells you how an e-mail was sent to you. The majority of web browsers hide the e-mail headers from the users because it can be tedious and annoying to look out on screen. However, most browsers have an option to open the headers. Some of the browsers will have that option on the screen, and other browsers will have that option in advanced options.
3. Find the IP address in the header. If there is more than one IP address in the header, you should look for the IP address that follows the words “Received:from” in the header.
4. Enter the IP address in a website that looks up IP addresses as described above, and view the results!

What Is an IP Address?

An IP address, also known as an Internet Protocol address, is a numerical distinction that is assigned to computers which are part of a computer network, and that are using the Internet Protocol for communicating between computers.

An IP address is a thirty two bit number, and it is used in the Internet Protocol Version 4 (also known as the IPv4). This system is still used today.

Since the amount of websites on the Internet has grown considerably, a new type of addressing system is also in use today. This new addressing system is the IPv6. This is a similar as to when phone numbers under a certain area code run out, so then a new area code is implemented for the location.

The IPv6 uses one hundred and twenty eight bits for the address, and it was developed in the mid nineties. Both the IPv6 addresses and the IPv4 addresses are stored in your computer as a type of binary code. However, although they are stored as binary code, they are displayed to the user as readable numbers.