Understanding Email Headers & Email Tracing

EMail Tracing & Email Headers

Have you ever wanted to find someone's email address, but didn't know how? Or perhaps you have an email address already, and want to find out who own's it.

If your like me, you have probably tried to find a place online to do it for you, but found some very suspect web-sites that I just did not feel confident using. In addition some of them appeared to be very inexpensive (legitimate sources cost over $200 per email traced), so I had serious doubts that they would contain up to date information or any information at all.

While I normally leave email tracing to my properly trained investigators, I felt it would be beneficial to examine what a email header is and offer some valuable tools and links that further define the anatomy of an email trace.

Garbage IN - Garbage Out:

I would like to make a point before anyone decides to dive into this. The information you receive in return for hiring an investigator to research an email address is only as good as the information that was supplied to the email carrier when the subscriber set-up their account.

Typically, there is NO VALIDATION PROCESS to verify the identity of the person setting-up the email account as it pertains to the name and address they are listing. It is not uncommon for a person to use an alias or fake name & address when setting-up an email account, that is even more prominent with the FREE email accounts (i.e., Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Gmail, AOL, Hushmail, etc.).

Understanding an Email Header:

Email headers are the lines at the top of an email message that are used by servers on the Internet as they deliver the message. Your email program normally shows you only the standard To:, From:, Subject:, and Date: headers, but there are more. The most important header when you want to complain about spam is Received:, which tells you the route the message took when it was sent to you.

You can instruct most email programs to display the full headers of any message that you receive.

While viewing the message,

• In Netscape: Select: View->Headers->All
• In Outlook: Select: View->Options
• In Pine: Type H. (Requires the enable-full-header-cmd feature.)
• In WebMail: Click View Full Headers.

Once you have the header, you will be able to start tracing the origination of each email. The following links will educate and instruct you on how to decipher the email header. It gets a little technical so you have been warned. Enjoy....

1. Reading Email Headers
2. All About Email Headers
3. How to find the Full Headers in your Email Program
4. View, Copy and Paste Email Headers for Email Trace
5. How can I trace where email came from