We regularly receive requests from people around the world to purchase a product from their company. Because we do not always trust these emails, we almost always look at the IP address of the mail. A location is almost always attached to the IP address. This is therefore an indication of the origin of the mail.
But how do we know the location of IP addresses?
Fortunately some free tools can be found on the internet. These websites are connected to a number of databases that determine the approximate location of the IP address. This is not always very accurate but you will get the correct country from the results.
How do those databases know the location?
We do not know this exactly either. Our guess is that these databases look at the company that has registered the IP addresses. So suppose your internet provider has its head office in Amsterdam but you live in Rotterdam yourself. If you then enter your IP address in this type of tools, you will most likely end up with an address in Amsterdam. Some providers, on the other hand, provide a more precise location. It almost never happens that IP addresses are directly linked to the user’s address.
What tools does Proxeuse use?
We mostly use the service of https://www.iplocation.net/ but we sometimes choose to lookup the IP ourself in the WHOIS-database. What is WHOIS? We therefore mainly use the WHOIS database of our domain provider.
