How to do a reverse email search

by Sophia Munoz
Emails are a wonderful thing. It is so simple to contact someone, send them information and receive a reply in just a matter of seconds. No waiting for the postman and no costly postage stamps. If you are wanting to contact a lot of people in a short period of time, this is simple to do with email. It is also very simple for people to contact you also. Sometimes this can be a bad thing. If you become the target of scams, identity theft, harassing emails or a bad computer virus, then you know that having an email address can be a pain. But did you know that it is possible to find out who has been sending you these malicious emails? Read on to discover how to do a reverse email search.

It is important that you familiarize yourself with the components that make up an email address. Arming yourself with this knowledge will make it easier when you begin to study how to track an email address.

Every email address contains a header. The header is what contains the information that you need to trace the email. Familiarizing yourself with the components that make up the header will reveal to you the path to the sender.

It is important to note here that if you don't know how to uncover the headers in your emails, then you need to do a search online that will tell you specifically how your email provider conceals these headers. Once you find out how to reveal the headers in the email, then you can begin to look for the information that will help you track an email address.

Once you have the header exposed, look carefully for a section that is labeled "received from." This is a very important part of the header because is shows you which machine is sending out the messages and which machine is accepting the message.

In this "from" section of the header there is an IP address. This can easily be spotted because it will be a series of numbers that are separated by periods. Take this IP address and use this information in a reverse DNS lookup service. There are a few of these services available on the Internet. These services can give you the user's ISP or the user's employer.

Another thing that you can do once you have the ISP address is to locate a service that will show you where the ISP is located geographically. You can narrow this down by city and state which will make it easier to track down the sender.

So now you have the basic information that you need to know on how to do a reverse email search. But be aware that email spammers and scammers have ways of using fake IP addresses that make it much harder to track them down. In cases like these. you may need to enlist the help of professional email trackers. There are services available that can do this for you, for a price. But now that you know how to track an email address, you may be able to do if yourself for free.

About the Author:

Sophia Munoz is an article writer who is fascinated by new gadgets. She has written hundreds of articles for specialized magazines and article directories. If you want to find out more about how to do a reverse email search, visit us for the latest news! This and other unique content 'How to do a reverse email search' articles are available with free reprint rights.