How many emails have you received that you have no idea who they are? Perhaps they’re offering you some fantastic deal that you ‘apparently’ cannot afford to miss out on?
We do too, daily..and quite frankly we want to find out who these people are and why they keep sending us emails. Our first thought here is, how exactly can we find someone online if we just have an email address?
We will talk about how to find someone’s social network with just an email address. We’ll also talk about how you can work out if that email address is being used on a dating website. We’ll also show you how to find out their house number, and finally we’ll talk about about how you can do this within 60 seconds.
Google you may be thinking as the obvious choice. However, unless the person behind the email address is chatting on forums or writing articles in blogs, its unlikely google will come up with the goods.
However, on our journey to google we came across a few websites offering ‘reverse email search’ for free. What is this? Lets look a little closer into reverse email lookups.
Reverse Email Lookup
What is a reverse email lookup? Its an application that allows you to find out the identity of the person who has originally registered the email address. It also uncovers other information on the email address, such as what social networks and dating sites the email may be associated with.
That’s quite a handy tool, right? I can see these email spammers running to the hills!
However, not quite as straight forward as you may think..
First, we’ll talk you through how you can do this manually (not easy!) and finally we’ll show you the easy way by using automated tools, some of them free..some of them not quite so free.
- How to find the email sender physical location.
If you go back to your email in question with the suspect email address, you’ll see a little button on most providers (google / yahoo / outlook has it) called ‘view source’. This is what it will look like:
Your interested in the received section, in particular, the number that is seperated by full stops (199.7.202.63). This number is called an IP address, which is essentially the phone number of the computer that was used to send the email a address.
Next, you want to see where that IP comes from right? the next part looks a little bit like the film out of Hackers (1980s for all you young folk). You need to to use a tool called Trace-route, which essentially bounces around the internet tracking down the IP to the closest location it can get. There are loads of trace-route tools online, but for our example we use tools.keycdn.com.
When you put the IP into trace route, you’ll get a great looking screen a little like this:
There you go, we now have the physical address (or as close as we can get for the moment) to the physical location of your sender. The more advanced our networks get these days, the closer these trace-routes can get to the physical front door. However, you now have an address to check out on google maps, see how close you can get to your target!
2) Reverse email search with Facebook
I know, Facebook does not seem like the first port of call to conduct some advanced email tracking, but its surprisingly useful. A lot of these email spammers, will also spam on Facebook. Facebook has over a billion users so there is a highly likely chance your sender has at one point in their life used the same email to login, even just for a few minutes. We only need one little mistake to track them down.
All you need to do is login to your own Facebook profile and go to the search bar. Literally just enter the email address into the search bar. You’ll be surprised how many people still have their email address as public!
3) What Dating sites are they on?
Dating websites do not typically publicise who is or who is not using a dating social network, they tend to keep those details quiet. However, its pretty easy to find out if an email address is being used on a dating site!! once we tell you, it will seem so obvious too. Go to your dating site of choice and try and register a new account but use the email address of the target your interested in. You’ll quickly get a pop-upon the page which says ‘Sorry! that email is already registered!” Wham, your email spammer likes to internet date.
Reverse Email Search (the easy way)
We understand you are busy, you have better things to do than visit each dating site and social network, entering email addresses and checking the details. Not to mention there being literally thousands of social networks out there! That’s why we need a fast, automatic and ideally free way of doing this.
We searched the web for you and tried 10 websites who claim to do this for free. I’m sure you wont be surprised that at least 6 of these did not end up being free. The others did not really do what they claimed to do, but we did find one needle in the haystack.
This website searched hundreds of social networks and dating sites for an email within 60 seconds. It also did usernames, which was very handy! Now we can try the first part of the email address as a username to find out if our spammer uses the username on any social networks.
We used the website UserSearch to do this, indeed it did not cost us a cent!
This website literally was a gem, it searched literally thousands of social networks and dating sites, but it also searched forums, crypto currency sites and it checked whether the email address has been reported as being hacked in the dark net!
They did offer a charged version that apparently is still in development so they offer it at discounted rates ($6.99 at the time of writing this article). We’ll if the free version is anything to go by, the charged version must be quite handy. If you want to get in touch with them, they seem to have a pretty active community on twitter if you want to follow them.
We’ll, we hope you learned something and ideally can at least scare off those email spammers by contacting them back with some useful information on perhaps where they live or ask how their dating is going! We certainly learned about a great new resource that will be used in future.
