What Are Reverse Email Address Lookups?
Use Email Search Technology to Identify an Email Owner
Jan 29, 2009
Dangers of Opening Anonymous Emails
Opening an email from an anonymous source is much like playing a game of Russian roulette, with the computer representing the potential victim. Most likely, the email is simply a forwarded video clip of a water skiing squirrel that an old friend decided you just had to see.
The other option is that the email contains a malicious virus that puts the proverbial bullet through a computer’s hard drive, allowing its brain to leak out onto the net for all to see. Knowing the origins of an email gives both security from malicious emails, and control over who sends mail by making it possible to track down the email’s sender.
What are Reverse Email Address Searches?
Reverse Email Address Lookups are tools that allow people to ascertain who is sending them emails by typing in the anonymous email’s address in order to find information pertaining to the owner. All that a person needs to do is type or paste the unknown email address into the right database and within seconds they will have their answers. The amount of information that will be available varies because there are different ways and places that reverse email searches are conducted.
Where to Conduct Reverse Email Searches?
Some webmail providers, such as Yahoo, provide a directory of Yahoo customers which allows a user to search for names, keywords, or email addresses using Yahoo user’s information. This means that if there is an anonymous email from Yahoo, all that needs to be done is typing the address into Yahoo’s directory. By simply typing in the email address of the sender the name of the sender and other information will be discovered. The one drawback to this type of search is that only Yahoo members are allowed to use Yahoo’s member search.
Most webmail providers do not maintain directories of their customer’s information because they want to protect their customer’s anonymity and privacy. To circumvent the problem, there are many different types of ‘Reverse Email Address Lookup’ sites on the internet, which can make finding the right one difficult. The burden of choice can be quite daunting and a search engine query for terms like “reverse email lookups” returns over 20 million results. Sifting through these results will bring you to a set of free reverse email lookup directories that can aid your investigation.
These sites are reliable and offer a great deal of information. Reverse email directories also offer the opportunity to discover information beyond a name by searching through social networking sites as well as more conventional databases. From a search results may include addresses, phone numbers, social networks, pictures, the owner’s occupation among other identifying information. By doing this it will become clear whether the anonymous email did in fact come from a friend or if it was spam coming from an unknown company in Thailand.
Private information that is contained within one’s computer is something that has to be protected, especially in a day and age where identity theft continues to be a growing and ongoing problem. It is important to guard against strangers attempting to access vital information, which is why knowing who is sending messages can be vitally important.
