Can sender of anonymous email be traced?

zaksmum

My family is having a problem with anonymous emails.

The sender is trying to cause trouble and I have heard that it's possible to trace the identity of the person concerned.

I'm 99% certain I know who it is but just need proof.

Does anyone know, please, how to discover for sure who has sent the emails?

bod1467

It's doubtful you can get the actual sender (without a court order), but you should be able to get the IP address from where it was sent.

Check the email headers.

OneADay

Use spamcop.net to report the abusive email to the sender's email provider. It may not be perfect but spamcop does trace back the network(s) through which the email came.

JJ_Egan

View message source may show original sender .

paddyrg

Can you post the email headers here (you can 'X' out the actual bit before the '@xyz.com') as that will give a straight answer how easy it is.

Alas if it's from GMail or the like, it gets trickier, but it's often possible with a bit of work to at least narrow it down.

zaksmum

I only have a print out of the email, not the actual one on a computer screen. So how can I get the email headers from this?

agrinnall

If you haven't printed the headers then you can't, you'll need the electronic version of the email.

paddyrg

agrinnall wrote: »

If you haven't printed the headers then you can't, you'll need the electronic version of the email.

Please also note, you need the original electronic version of the mail too - a forward will destroy them

penon

Also its worth noting unless they have registered the email address with their actual details you wont get much, yes you can "trace" ip addresses but without a court order you wont get much further than establishing what ISP they were using and again thats assuming they didnt use proxies, public wi-fi etc.... (Do a search in google for "disposable email" to see how easy it is to create an anonymous email account)

To be perfectly honest with you, if your 99% sure you know who it is I would confront them/report them as you will only be wasting your time trying to trace them.

The other option depending on how many accounts you have tied to that email address is to just create a new one and ditch the old one.

marvin

If it is a matter of harassment then report it too the police it is illegal and they can do all the tracing required.

Harassment is not just threats etc. but unwelcome attention of a persistent type where the person has been asked to desist or where they cannot be asked because they have not been identified.

RumRat

I second Police involvement. It happened to a friend of mine who was suffering from email and Facebook harassment aimed at his business. The Police were excellent and took it very seriously.