How accurate is the city and country shown in the session list?
Short answer: country is almost always right, city is a useful hint but not a fact. The location next to each session in your Valid Email Checker account is reverse-derived from the public IP that hit our servers, run through ipinfo.io's IP database. There is no GPS, no Wi-Fi triangulation, and no browser geolocation prompt. The accuracy you get depends entirely on what kind of network you are on.
Accuracy by network type
| Network | Country accuracy | City accuracy |
|---|---|---|
| Residential broadband (cable, fiber) | Effectively 100% | Around 85% within the right metro |
| Cellular / mobile data | Around 95% | Often wrong — carrier gateway, not your tower |
| Corporate office or VPN-on-by-default | Right country, sometimes another country (HQ exit) | Often the office, not your desk |
| Commercial VPN (NordVPN, ExpressVPN, etc.) | Wherever the exit node is, not where you are | Datacenter city of the exit |
| Datacenter or hosting IP | Datacenter country | Datacenter city |
Why the city is so much weaker than the country
IP blocks are allocated to ISPs at a regional level, not assigned house by house. When ipinfo.io says "Chicago" for a Comcast IP, what it actually knows is that the IP is in a Comcast pool that historically gets used somewhere in or around Chicago — which might be the suburbs 40 miles out, a neighbouring metro area, or sometimes a totally different city if Comcast has shuffled allocations. The country answer is structurally stronger because countries hand IP blocks to their domestic ISPs at a national level, and reassignments across borders are rare.
When the location looks wrong
- Mobile data on the road. Carriers route traffic through regional gateway cities. Your phone in Denver might come up as Salt Lake City because that is where the carrier exits the traffic.
- VPN turned on. The session will show wherever your VPN exit node lives, which is exactly the design intent of a VPN.
- Office network with a centralised VPN. Many enterprises route all outbound traffic through HQ — a London employee can appear as New York if HQ is in New York.
- Recent IP reassignment. ipinfo.io's database refreshes constantly, but a brand-new IP block can mis-locate by a wide margin for the first few weeks.
If you genuinely cannot explain a country mismatch, treat it as a suspicious login and tighten the account: change your password and enable authenticator-app 2FA.
Related questions
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