When you’re online you might occasionally want to know your external IP address, perhaps to confirm the internet connection you’re using or find out whether a VPN is working.

The easiest way to do this is via a browser window. A site like WhatIsMyIP.com will display your address immediately, or you could simply enter IP at Google, and your address will be top of the search results.

TrueIP is a free Windows tool which also finds and displays your IP address, but can also display related information and alert you if your IP changes.

The program requires installation, unfortunately, but this seems to be mostly for convenience. There’s no marketing payload and barely any resources used (the uninstall program takes more space than TrueIP’s own code).

On launch the program adds an icon to your system tray. Hovering your mouse cursor over this displays a tooltip with your current external IP.

View your local and external IP addresses, host name and more from a single dialog

You can also display the IP by double-clicking the icon, or right-clicking it and selecting “Quick Information”.

Right-clicking the icon and selecting “Full Information” displays your external IP, local IP, MAC address, host name and more.

An Options dialog enables launching the program at startup, using a different source to retrieve your address (the default is myip.dnsomatic.com), how often to check the address (every 10 minutes by default), and more.

If it’s important to know when your address changes, you can have it displayed in a tray notification, sent in an email, saved to an FTP server, or just logged to a file for analysis later.

Setting these up can take a little work, but TrueIP does offer plenty of configuration options. When setting up email notifications, for instance, you’re able to define the target address, email subject and message body (with support for replaceable parameters), From address, SMTP server, port and authentication details. More up-to-date options would be welcome, like direct authentication for Gmail, but it should be enough for most situations.

TrueIP is a free application for Windows 2000 and later.