How does an IP address travel from one place to another???

I had tracked an IP address from a threatening email that I had recieved to a Cox Communications host that was in San Mateo, CA at one point, and than an hour later it was showing it in Eureka, CA which as some know are not close cities. Now my only confusion is that Cox does not provide any wireless services that I know of. I have figured out that this place might be a business, and most businesses run off of servers that should not travel via satellite. Why would a business server hit one satellite, and than another so far away in such little time? Please help, as I am very confused and would like to rest easy. Thanks =]

An IP address is assigned to an organization for their use -- generally they are quite static when used by high speed connections, but they can be dynamic when used by dialup. In general, without the assistance of the party who is responsible for teh IP address (Cox in your case), you cannot pinpoint with any accuracy the location of the current user.

There are programs that hackers use which allow them to change IPs frequently so that no one can track them ... it could be this, or it's just an IP which was used by someone, then this someone is disconnected, and someone else connected and that IP was allocated to him/her ...

You are trying to do something that experts have a hard time doing. An IP address can be masked. It would appear that a message came from one place but it actually came from somewhere else. Unless you are taking the message seriously I would not waste my time on it. If you believe it is serious, report it to the police as well as to COX and give the police a list of suspects. You are probably tracking a dynamic IP address.

If a hacker, spammer or other was sending you threatening emails, you should forward that email, including the headers, to your internet service provider and let them investigate. By law if the email you're receiving is illegal they must report it to officials.

Also, you can take your email and visit a very popular, and powerful, anti-spam email website called Spam Cop. http://www.spamcop.net

Once you register, takes a few seconds and free, you can cut and paste your email into their program that will trace all of the locations the email traveled and report to each administrator about your email plus show you all of the places it will send a report too.

Many other internet providers and anti-spam software companies use Spam Cop's black list of spam and malicious sites and IP addresses.

Unfortunately, the various IP addresses or locations can be from a number of reasons beyond your technical control. If the bad guy was using proxy servers that could change his IP address.

Moreover, that person can be dialing in from various cities too. It's very possible it's not even his IP address or he's using someone else's computer (A Zombie computer) without their knowledge.

You can check where that email originated too by going here: http://www.geobytes.com/SpamLocator.htm

Here's a good IP search tool that can give you more information. http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm

Good Luck!

An IP address doesn't mean a wireless connection all the time. Sometimes an ISP gets a whole batch of IP address assigned to it, so they serve them out dynamically, so if one person logs off, that IP address is free again, so the next person logging in gets that same IP address

HTH