If it possible to find someones name from an email address.

Can you use email addresses to identify the sender.

[Hinata]

hello. im new here and i wanted to know something. i have a question about finding out a persons name with just an e-mail...you see, i've been getting these weird e-mails and i want to find out the name of the person that sent them...or at least some kind of information about them. isnt there any way i can find out their pi numbers or something?

[kodaks]

Welcome to Webmaster World, Hinata!

Are they solicited emails, or personal emails?

[whoisgregg]

You probably aren't going to be pleased with the results of your search. Tracking down a specific person is nearly impossible. Getting IP addresses/hostnames is easy, but most hosts/ISPs are not forthcoming about their customer's personal and private information unless you are asking with the government papers required by the government involved.

Your e-mail client should have an option called "Show raw source," "Show original message," or "Show long headers." Select any of those to see the actual contents of the message. You can run whois on the IP addresses found.

You'd typically look for the last "Received:" header and whois the blue IP addresses (this snippet widgetized):

Received: from [192.168.123.192] (4.8.9.6.ispwhowonttellyou-anything.net [4.8.9.6]) by mailserver.net) with ESMTP id ig785jgnd23 for <[e-mail]>; Mon, 2 Aug 2004 12:05:30 -0400 (EDT))

This is a valuable exercise anyways to get a better understanding of what an e-mail really is (just a text file).

[Hinata]

i see...well then, thank you for the information you seem to know a lot! oh, and thank you for the welcome kodaks. they where personal e-mails.