Do you need to trace an email address to locate or identify the sender? You can still achieve this even if the email account is now closed and is no longer active. It may be a bit more difficult, but it is still possible to identify the person behind that email address. In this article we will attempt to address the additional issues an investigator faces when attempting to investigate an old or state email address that has been deactivated.
First, what we need to do is find out if the email address we are trying to investigate is still active or has been closed. If the email address we are investigating was opened for the sole purpose of contacting our customer and then closed immediately after sending an email, it will be difficult to trace. But if the account has been used for years but was recently deleted after sending the offending communication, it can be a very simple investigation. In fact, the email address can be found in an instant database service.
To determine if your email is active, you need to test it using one of the many online services that will tell you if your email is active. You can also email the account from a fake email account and see if it bounces. Of course, there are many more technical methods that you can use, but in this article we will cover the basics.
If we have determined that the email is inactive, this cuts our investigative techniques in half. Because we can only analyze incoming email data. In an ideal investigation, we’ll investigate the senders’ computer by analyzing the information we can capture when they open a pretext email we send them.
So we’ll need to parse the incoming headers and extract the IP address, use geo-tracking, IP address location, and old Whois to identify the sender’s ISP. We may also investigate the IP address to see if it is associated with any other online activity. But in addition to IP information, we can tell the senders email program, such as Outlook Express.
We may submit the email to a database lookup to see if it has been used online in the past. We may search the deep web, member sites, online billing and payment services to see if the email address was ever used in a financial transaction. Social networks also have an email search function to find or add friends.
There are also paid searches like online infidelity investigations and online gambling investigation searches that can trace an email to an online gaming site or a secret online personal ad on a dating site. This type of email investigation can return an image of the person behind the email address.
So, as you can see, it is possible to trace an email and locate or identify the sender even if the email address has been deactivated or removed.