Persona - Based on Email Address Learn how to interpret email addresses and attempt to discover the real author associated with an email.

This pie chart shows where email accounts are hosted (source = messagingonline.com).  26% of accounts are associated with a user's Internet service provider (ISPs may be paid service or a free ISP)  About 43% of email is through an employer/employee environment.  This leaves a very large 31% of email accessed through web-based interfaces which tend to be free and fairly anonymous (Hotmail and yahoo dominate this market sector).  Before you continue with the rest of this page, make sure you are familiar with the concepts of Email Architecture Details,

The "from" part of an email is absolutely unreliable.   The user can put anything he wants there in their email client.  To really understand where an email came from , you must look at the "headers"   Headers contain additional information like where did your email server receive the message from, etc. It turns out that trying to track down the true source of an email is exactly what anti-spam advocates also work on.  Therefore the best methods for identifying email can be gained from studying anti-spam techniques.

Most email servers will be properly configured to only send email from their own users.  This way if the user is "mis-behaving" (sending spam, etc) than the system administrator can cancel the user's account.  Unfortunately, some mail servers are configured to allow anybody to forward their email through the mail server.  This is called an "open SMTP relay" and can be heavily exploited by spammers.   Such sources of Spam are often identified on the RBL - Real-time Blackhole List - which is used by some ISPs to block Spam sources.  Here is the RBL Home page, which also supports a query to see if a server is currently on the RBL.

For more information:

• Tracing Email - A very detailed write-up - very informative.
• Email Spam - describes  how to read email headers
• tracking email - a tutorial from visualware.
• Mail Abuse Prevention System -
• Free Email Directory - Over 1000 places to get a free email account - This is useful if you want to share an internet account with other family members, and you want them to have their own email account - including foreign language email -  http://www.emailaddresses.com/email_language.htm - Some of these services have many domains to choose from (Example mail.com)
• Readnotify.com - discretely embeds a graphic into your email , and then lets yoy know when that email has been opened along with the recipients' IP address.
• Search for an email address using: Yahoo's people search (advanced page),
• Users may also hide their email using techniques described on the privacy page.

So far this web page has talked only about email addresses...  But what about the user IDs people supply when using many forms of peer to peer applications? (AOL Instant Messenger, chat, powwow, IRC, Netmeeting, etc).  Many of these applications will allow users to connect to each other based on a user-supplied ID which is often an email address.  You should recognize that a user can provide ANY email address they want into the application.  This will work just fine as long as your "buddies" know which email address you are using at that moment.

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