MSN used to post the IP at the bottom of a message several years ago and through a free internet program, I found where a ton of spam e mail was coming from.

Now, MSN does not provide these numbers.

I read that some people ghave found were a person actually lives or at least the actual country. That is waht i seek. I am NOT trying to find a person's actual home but i would like to know if a person writes me if they are even in the country they claim.

So is there a way or a program that is either free or commerical that pulls out the IP address?

You make a good point about IP addresses but in the end if someone wants to hide or change their location all they have to use is a proxy server located in the country they want.

It's not easy to find ip addresses when chatting since, with most chat programs (Yahoo, MSN, etc..) you actually connect to the chatting servers and all information passes through them instead of directly connecting to the person you are actually chatting with.

You probably already know this but if you do find the ip address of the person you are chatting with you can use web sites like this:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/

to find the location of the person.

They don't even need to go through a proxy server. They use something called IP tunneling software. It's probably what spam posters use when they're banned from messageboards so they can keep posting.