Other Find the Person Behind an Email Address

[Kalcifer]

I definitely thought it was worth posting here.

You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?

Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.

No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

1. Find the sender’s location



Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.

2. Reverse email search with Facebook



Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.

If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to TinEye – it’s a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

3. Check all the other Social Networks



You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

4. People Search



Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

Also see: Find Postal Addresses with Google Maps

Original source here

[M7ck]

I just ignore emails when I dont know who the sender is, it makes no difference to me if they are sent from Scotland or Nigeria.

[Mankz]

Originally Posted by M7ck

I just ignore emails when I dont know who the sender is, it makes no difference to me if they are sent from Scotland or Nigeria.

[bigsharn]

Originally Posted by M7ck

I just ignore emails when I dont know who the sender is, it makes no difference to me if they are sent from Scotland or Nigeria.

But which one's riskier to open?

[Cabe6403]

Interesting couple of tools there. Can't say I have much use for it now but you never know

[M7ck]

Originally Posted by bigsharn

But which one's riskier to open?

Doesn't make a difference they all get deleted unopened.

[Burnout21]

Can we use this to spam the spammer?

I had one cheaky sod, somehow spam me from my own email address. The account was never hacked, but somehow masked there address with mine?

[Furymouse]

Originally Posted by Burnout21

Can we use this to spam the spammer?

I had one cheaky sod, somehow spam me from my own email address. The account was never hacked, but somehow masked there address with mine?

Is your name by chance Tyler Durden?

[Burnout21]

Originally Posted by Furymouse

Is your name by chance Tyler Durden?

first rule, 'don't talk about it'