How do I find out who's sending harassing email?

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Summary: Both children and adults can receive harassing or abusive email. Sadly there's no easy way to trace it back to a sender who doesn't want to be found.

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I think it's kind of frightening how often I get questions like this one.

The sad reality is that the answer for most people is very, very simple:

You don't.

So what can you do?

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Each time I write on this topic I'm immediately flooded with even more requests similar to this one that indicate that folks have simply missed the point of the article. I don't mean to be rude or obnoxious, but I need to be excruciatingly clear at the outset:

You cannot trace the origin of email to an individual, an address or in most cases, even to a specific computer. If there's any hope at all, it requires the involvement of the police or other law enforcement.

If the sender of an email does not want to be identified, and if the email does not clearly identify who it's from then there's no way for you as the recipient of that email to trace it back to the person that sent it.

And yes in many ways, to put it bluntly, that sucks. Anonymous email certainly has its uses, but harassing people shouldn't be one of them. And yet, here we are.

For true email, there are sometimes clues in the email headers that you typically don't see. In my earlier article How can I trace where email came from? I give a brief overview of what those headers look like and what information might be gleaned from them. (Applications like Facebook aren't really "true" email, and don't have these headers. As far as I can tell there's nothing available to message recipients on Facebook or other social media sites that could be used in a similar way to email headers.)

Using email headers you can sometimes determine the "name" of the computer sending the email, and its internet IP address. Many times the email is sent using web services like Hotmail or GMail, in which case that information doesn't apply to the user, but rather to Hotmail's or GMail's own servers. Sometimes the services will include the internet IP address of the machine that actually visited the web site to send the mail.

But even if you're "lucky" enough to get that information, that's still not enough.

In another earlier 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. An IP address actually tells you very little about the real world location of the machine (or machines!) that it represents. At best you can usually locate the ISP responsible for allocating that IP address to actual users.

But once you get that far, you'll need help.

And that's where law enforcement comes in. 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 own workload.

Based 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. Your best bet may, in fact, be to use methods unrelated to the 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.

And at the risk of offending with redundancy, I have to reiterate:

You cannot trace the origin of email to an individual, an address or in most cases, even to a specific computer. If there's any hope at all, it requires the involvement of the police or other law enforcement.

Related:

• Ask Leo! - How can I trace where email came from?

• Ask Leo! - Can I get someone's name and address from their IP address?

• Ask Leo! - How do I figure out who owns an IP address?

Article C3333 - March 27, 2008