![]() A reminderĪt the risk of offending with redundancy, I have to reiterate: Political dissidents, corporate whistle-blowers, and other individuals with important and sensitive information to share would disagree.Įmail is simply a tool that can be used for both good and evil. In situations like this, it’s tempting to have a knee-jerk reaction that anonymity, and in particular, anonymous email, is evil. Your best bet may be to use methods unrelated to email, such as your son’s school’s social structure and dynamics – perhaps with the aid of the staff there – to determine who might be responsible. Their response will vary depending on the seriousness of the charge, how seriously they take these types of issues in general, their own expertise in the area, and, of course, their workload.īased on my own experience with the sheer number of requests I get on this topic, I can only imagine that an already overworked justice system is going to be hard pressed to give you any satisfaction. At best, you can usually locate the ISP responsible for allocating that IP address to actual users.īut once you get that far, you’ll need help.Īnd that’s where law enforcement comes in. An IP address tells you very little about the real-world location of the machine (or machines!) it represents. In another article, Can I get someone’s name and address from their IP address?, the answer is clearly “no” – at least not without the help of law enforcement. ![]() Sometimes the services will include the internet IP address of the machine that actually visited the website to send the mail.īut even if you’re “lucky” enough to get the IP address, that’s still not enough information to help you. Often, the email is sent using web services like Hotmail or Gmail, in which case the IP address will be of Hotmail’s or Gmail’s own servers, not the sender’s. Using email headers, you can sometimes determine the “name” of the computer sending the email, and its internet IP address. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing available to message recipients of those systems that could be used in a way similar to email headers. As a result, they don’t have these headers. Unfortunately, applications like Facebook and other types of messaging systems aren’t really email at all. In my article How can I trace where email came from?, I give a brief overview of what those headers look like and what information may be gleaned from them. There are sometimes clues in email headers that you typically don’t see. If the sender of an email does not want to be identified, and if the email does not clearly identify who it’s from, there’s no way for you as the recipient of that email to trace it back to the person who sent it. If there’s any hope at all, it requires the involvement of law enforcement. You cannot trace the origin of an email to an individual, an address, or, in most cases, even a specific computer.
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