Email Header IpAddress GeoIP report Addin for Outlook and Outlook on the Web in Office365

Something that can be useful from time to time when looking at email delivery issues or email threats is to be able to see the Geographical regions that an email has traversed in its delivery. Usually this information gets stored in the Email Header in the received headers but also depending on the client and services being used the Source IpAddress of the client and other intermediaries may get written in other properties.

Because I needed something last week to do this and couldn't find any other addins to do this I created a pretty simple Outlook addin that

• Gets the headers from a Message using the REST API in Office365
• Uses a RegEx to get all the IPAddresses from that header
• Uses a Set in JavaScript to then de duplicate these IPAddresses
• Then I used one of the many free GeoIP web services out there to query each of the returned IPAddresses from the Regex matches and finally display the result in a table but to Outlook

For example here is what it returns where run against a normal gray email that was forward to my Office365 Mailbox from Gmail

For a quick diagnostic this information is pretty useful as it tells you where the email traversed and the Org information generally will tell you the cloud providers being used. Doing this on email in my junk email folder that where of a nefarious nature showed that the these emails had transitied through  countries that are the usual suspects in this type of activity.

I've hosted the code up on GitHub here https://github.com/gscales/gscales.github.io/tree/master/MailGeoRoutes so the addin can be added straight from the Repo if you want to try it using (MyAddins - Custom Addins) and

https://gscales.github.io/MailGeoRoutes/MailGeoRoutes.xml

This uses REST to get the header so will only work on Office365 but the same thing could also be done using EWS for OnPrem servers from Exchange 2013 onward.