A week after , which enables people to track the exact location of friends or family through their mobile devices, the company Wednesday announced that its can now show the location of e-mail writers.

"Some time ago I noticed how all mail systems tell you when an e-mail was written, but not where it was sent from," said Marco Bonechi, a software engineer, in a blog post. "Because I love to travel, the first question in many messages I receive is "where are you?" and by the time I answer, I am often somewhere else. So in my 20% time, I wrote an experimental that detects your location and appends the city region and country names to your signature."

Bonechi noted that people can use the new Location in Signature feature by going to the Labs tab in under Settings and then clicking on Signature Preferences.

"It'll use your public IP address to determine your location, so it may not always be that accurate," he noted. "For example, if you're at Heathrow airport, IP detection may put you in Germany. If you want more accurate location detection, make sure your browser has a version of that supports the location module. That way, of wi-fi access point signals to recognize that you're actually in London."

Bonechi also added that users who want to keep their location private can disable the option or delete their location from specific e-mails.