Mail Detective

Mail Detective is a super handy app for macOS that makes it super easy to trace the IP address of email senders and find out where they're located on a map. You know how sometimes you get those sketchy emails? Well, this tool helps you figure out which ones are real and which might be scams.

How to Use Mail Detective

Using Mail Detective is a breeze! All you have to do is drag an email from your inbox right onto the main window of Mail Detective. It's that simple! Plus, it works with popular email apps like Apple’s Mail, Airmail, Microsoft Outlook 2011, Mail Pilot, and Postbox.

If Dragging Doesn't Work

If your email client doesn’t let you drag and drop messages (some don’t), no worries! You can check out the raw message source of the email and copy it into Mail Detective instead. Apps like Thunderbird and Unibox can show you that raw message source so you can grab the sender's IP address easily.

Copying Raw Message Source

You can also use the built-in system service to copy and paste that raw message source text directly into Mail Detective. That way, you're covered no matter what email client you're using!

A Few Drawbacks

However, during our testing of Mail Detective, we noticed its detection rate isn’t as high as we hoped. This might make some people think twice before buying it. To really up its game, it would be great if Mail Detective could use info from the “Received: from” field found in the raw source of emails.

The Bottom Line

If you're looking to find where an email sender is located or want help spotting spam messages, Mail Detective could be just what you need. Fingers crossed that future updates will boost its detection rate!