How to do a Reverse Email Search

Looking to find out who sent you that email? Start with doing a reverse email search. Doing a search can result in finding the persons name and address. If the person is hiding their name and address, you can take it one step further and locate the person's IP address from the email they sent you.

This will get you one step closer to unmasking your mystery email sender. For details on how to do a reverse email search and finding an IP address, follow these step by step instructions.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Do a Reverse Email Search-
   
   First locate which email provider the anonymous email is coming from. If it's a yahoo address, use Yahoo's people finder. If not, you can also try worldemaildirectory.com. Here you can find a name for an email listing.

2. Finding an IP address-
   
   If the person wants to remain hidden, using their email address to find their name most likely won't work. To uncover where the email is coming from, you can find their computer's IP address,which is much harder to hide than a name. To find the IP address, you must locate the full email header, and paste it into the ip trace website shown in resources.

3. Finding an email header-
   
   An email header is the first step to email tracking. A header is all the information on where the email has come from. This is a good reminder that everything done on the internet is traceable!
   
   Finding an email header will vary from what email provider you are using. For yahoo, click on the email you want to trace, find the "Show Full Header" button on the lower right hand side of the email. Now copy all the information and paste into the ip tracer shown in resources.
   
   Hotmail - Make sure you are using full hotmail version, not the basic version. Right click on the message and choose "View source",then copy and paste.
   
   If you aren't using yahoo or hotmail, you can find instructions on how to find the email header on the IP searcher itself.

Resources

• To get email IP address

[static404]

on 6/25/2009 Didn't know you coudl do a reverse email search. Thanks for the info.

[vikki9]

on 4/22/2009 This is great to know - many thanks!

[taskeinc]

on 3/10/2009 great info, I saved the IP address trace website to my favorites .. thanks