personal info from email addresses -- Possible?

[Garrett Smith]

This is more of a "detective" type of question.

It's bugging me how these cowards hide and use the web. Web anonymity is fine for some things (drug dealers, extreme politics, et c), but not when it comes to real business.

Hopefully is stays unlocked...

Still trying to find out names and addresses and EVERYTHING I can on certain individuals. Not naming names or pointing fingers or complaning.

I'm looking for someone. I have an email address.


"Put your balls into it" - Garrett Smith
"True Strength comes from within" - Garrett Smith

[Dan]

Depends on the email address, whether they own the domain, and many other things. Sometimes its easy:

[Personal Address removed]

Sometimes it's impossible.

For example, you can create a webmail account with all fake settings. Now, if the email you receive doesn't have the sender's IP address in (Yahoo & hotmail, for example, send the sender's IP address in the email headers) then the only way to find out who sent it would be to contact the owner of the webmail servers. You'd have to ask them to look in their logs for the person who sent the email.

Once you have an IP, you can find out the ISP, but (as in the case of a test from a friend's yahoo account) this will give you nothing more than something like proxy3.leeds.ac.uk. This is the dead end. To get past here you'd need to ask the ISP/university/company to find out which user/subscriber sent that particular email.

The police could get them to do this, but it is highly unlikely they'd do this for your own ends. Unless you managed to find contacts in the organisation who are subseptable to bribes.

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[Garrett Smith]

Hey Dan. You didn't have to dump my personal info on this message to prove your point.

I could post your info here too but that'd be immature, don't you think?


Getting the ISP doesn't really help (like you said).

I have:
<user>@<domain>.<ext>
Who is <user>? He's employed at <domain>. He must have a boss. I'm sure he lives somewhere, maybe has family, parents, a phone number...


<blockquote id="quote"><span class="smalltext" id="quote">quote:<hr id="quote">
police could get them to do this, but it is highly unlikely they'd do this
<hr id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></span id="quote">
Lol. highly unlikely to get the police to do ANYTHING. lol.




"The releasing of anger can better any medicine under the sun"
-Phil Anselmo

[Tim Scarfe]

Dan/Garrett,

I have edited the post to remove the personal address. Feel free to put it back if you think I am doing this out of turn.

Cheers

P.S. Garrett, I think your time would be better spent thinking of a way to get an up-front fee for use of your scripts. You could easily get the script to query your domain for an xml list of allowed domains for it to run on. You could then obsfucate this functionality. I know it's easy to crack but you might be suprised how effective it is.

--
Regards,
Tim Scarfe <tim@developer-x.com>
http://www.developer-x.com

[wranlon]

I suppose you could look at this from a copyright standpoint. Someone is using your copyrighted material without permission, so you might contact the Web host, and cc the Web host's provider, with a request to remove or block requests to the infringing material or materials that include and/or link to the infringing material.



Stephen W. Cote
wranlon@hotmail.com
http://www.whitefrost.com/

[Dan]

Tim: Thanks, I was gonna remove it anyway after a short while.

Garrett: I wasn't being immature, just proving a point! I am fully aware that my info is equally easy to find, and to be honest it worries me! All you need is some crazy fool (no fingers pointed) to get carried away, pissed off or to be just plain annoying and you've got a real life stalking case on your hands. That would NOT be fun!!!


Now, back to the question in hand. And for the record I certainly don't condone this, but even without DNS records and the like it is relativly simple to trace a person if you have a legitimate company email address. Once you know the company then you can find a phone number and address. All you need to do now is formulate a real life game plan that will get you what you need.

If you just want to be put in touch with him, you can try a blag when you get through to the switch board. If you have a surname it'll be easier:
- just ask for "John" or whatever (I know at my company you'd be put through to me, little worrying I know!)
- explain that it's work related and your recent email messages have been bounced

If you want more info you can try more subversive techniques (they're harder to get right and might not work so well). For example, companies aren't meant to give out personal info but you could pretend to be an old friend from school who wants to send a suprise Christmas card (or think up something more believable).


But like Tim and Stephen say there is probably a better way to get what you want. Or you could just cut your losses, spend no more time on this problem and let sleeping-dogs-lie -- that'd be the mature option!


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[Garrett Smith]

Good ideas, Dan. If I can get past customer service, though. I'd have to get some other number. Thanks for endorsing this, Dan. I'll make sure to mention your full name and website when I call.

Tim, the problem with domain restrictions -- and I tried this -- is that noone buys it unless they can make a mock up with it and this is usually on a server, not as file: protocol. I sold NOTHING for about 4 weeks. I got rid of that stuff. So I'll make more money by hoping that people pay. SUcks, but that's how it goes.


BTW, Symphony X - Great Stuff...



"The releasing of anger can better any medicine under the sun"
-Phil Anselmo

[Dan]

I quote from my last post:<blockquote id="quote"><span class="smalltext" id="quote">quote:<hr id="quote">I certainly don't condone this<hr id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></span id="quote">

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