Emails are a wonderful thing. It is so simple to contact someone, send them information and receive a reply in just a matter of seconds. No waiting for the postman and no costly postage stamps. If you are wanting to contact a lot of people in a short period of time, this is simple to do with email. It is also very simple for people to contact you also. Sometimes this can be a bad thing. If you become the target of scams, identity theft, harassing emails or a bad computer virus, then you know that having an email address can be a pain. But did you know that it is possible to find out who has been sending you these malicious emails? Read on to discover how to do a reverse email search.

Learning how to do a reverse email search is not that hard once you learn the components of an email address. This is the most important and critical step to take before you begin to track an email address.

Every email address contains a header. The header is what contains the information that you need to trace the email. Familiarizing yourself with the components that make up the header will reveal to you the path to the sender.

The first thing that you should do is to learn how to uncover the header to your email. Some email providers will have the headers clearly visible while others make it a little harder to uncover the header. Do some research online about your particular email provider to learn how to reveal your headers.

Now that you have the header opened, you need to find the part that says received from. This is where the gold lies. It will have two sections that you are looking for, "from and by". The "from" part shows you which machine is sending the message and the "by" part will show which machine is accepting it.

Next, you need to look for the IP address in the "from" section of the email header. This will be a series of four numbers that are separated by periods. Once you have the IP address you can use this information in combination with a reverse DNS lookup service. There are many free to use DNS lookup services on the Internet. This service will show you who the user's ISP or employer is.

Now if you want to find out where this ISP is located geographically, you can do a search on the Internet for sites that provide this service. You can find out what city and state an ISP address is located in. This will give you some great clues about the sender of the email.

So now you have the basic information that you need to know on how to do a reverse email search. But be aware that email spammers and scammers have ways of using fake IP addresses that make it much harder to track them down. In cases like these. you may need to enlist the help of professional email trackers. There are services available that can do this for you, for a price. But now that you know how to track an email address, you may be able to do if yourself for free.