In order to trace the IP address of someone who hacking or spamming yourwebsite, you must have some kind of logging facility in your website turned on and an access to the reporting interface of this facility. Such logs document the client IP address for each access to your website.

If you are using a Content Management solution for your website (e.g. Websphere, Microsoft CMS, Drupal, Joomla, etc.), turn on the product's web logging option and consult the product's log reports.

If your website is hosted locally, make sure your webserver's logging is turned on and consult the webserver's logs.

If your website is hosted with a hosting service, contact your hosting company and either ask them about a log reporting interface you can use or ask them to help you in tracing the requested IP address by having their admin staff browsing the hosting servers logs.

One of the nicest ways to obtain IP addresses of clients accessing your website is to deploy a Web Analytics tool (that will also and mainly help you in analyzing and optimizing your website activity). Google provides a powerful web analytics service, called Google Analytics, free of charge. By just inserting a small Javascript to all generated HTML pages on your website, you will be able to instantly track and analyze your website activity, plus, you will easily obtain the requested hacker IP address. See Google Analytics for more information.

First of all, be aware that an IP address you obtain as suspected to pertain to the spammer might belong to an innocent user/website whom very sophisticated abusers are using to disguise themselves. Therefore, it is very important to meticulously follow the guidelines provided in order to maximize the chances of pinpointing the IP address of the real spammer.

Secondly, disregard the From: and To: fields of the spam email. Spammers can put whatever values they want in these fields (and usually they put values that will lure you to open the email).

The correct way to obtain the spammer IP address lies in analyzing the email header that documents the way the email passed from the original sender to the recipient mailbox.

Most mail clients and webmail services hide the header information when viewing the email in the default email view but provide a special "source view" option to see the complete email including the header or the header information itself.

To see the email header in Microsoft Outlook, open the spam email and choose View > Options. You can see the email header in a box at the bottom of the window.

To see the email header in Gmail, open the spam email and click on the down arrow on the right side of the "Reply" button and choose "Show Original" from the drop-down menu.

The following links provide instructions on how to obtain the spammer IP address from the email header: