Are you an owner of an email address?

Most likely so. In this day and age, almost everyone including your grandmother is an owner of an email account.  As you check your inbox, you may find that there may be ones you might want to look more closely at.

If someone you don’t know sends you an email, it is natural to want to know who the person is, even if the email is not spam or unfriendly. Let us look at why that is the case.

What would anyone want to know the owner of an email address?

                                                                  Knowing a sender’s identity (or the owner of the email address sending you the message) can tell you whether or not you want to reply to the email. Some emails contain the name of the person or the owner of an email  who sent it, and even if it doesn’t, some email programs will tell you the name of the owner of an email account is registered under and include the information in the same line as the email address. If this data is not available, sometimes you can learn more by looking at the email address itself.

While an email address  may not give you a name, the domain name (the word between the @ and the .com part) can give you a clue. Major email providers like yahoo and lycos won’t tell you much, but the domain is something unusual like ‘rockhounds.com’ or ‘businessname.com’, you can perform a simple Google search for the domain name. Read the rest of this entry

It can be very scary to receive harassing or threatening email in your inbox. Anyone who has been targeted by this type of email knows that it can be extremely upsetting- especially since you generally don’t know the identity of the person behind it. Is this a real threat? Is this some kid who thinks it’s a funny prank? Does this person know me, who I am, where I live? These types of questions can keep a person awake at night. If you receive an email like this, the most important thing to do immediately is to save the email- don’t delete it. Not only can it serve as powerful evidence later, but it can provide the very information the authorities will need to track down the perpetrator. This important information is hidden in the email header.
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