how do they track e-mails???????

[goldilocks24]

Hello, been getting e-mails from someone - I think it may be a prank and someone trying to cause trouble. I have heard that the police can track e-mails back to whoever sent them - but how do they do this? and also, do they pin'point the exact pc it was sent off? would like some advice so I know who has been sending them and wether it would be worth asking the police about this.

[Ethel]

You need to learn how to read email headers - the IP address will be there and from there you can report it to the ISP.

I suggest you save all these emails as evidence - you can certainly report it to the police who will be able to track down the sender.

Have a read of this - if you don't use Outlook you can still read the headers:

http://www.mykp.co.uk/default.asp?id=147

[jake-the-peg]

No they can't - well they can't if the sender know's what he's doing.

As Ethel says there are headers to E-mails that show what servers they've been through but there are many servers out there that are set up poorly and are known as "open relays" it's very trivial to use these to be anonymous or even pretend to be someone else doing this to try to damage someone's reputation is called a "Joe Job".

There are many other ways to accomplish this but basically if you send a mail in good faith it can be tracked but if youo want to hide it's pretty easy and there's not a whole lot the police or anybody else can do about it

[Panic Button]

My Norton allows me to identify a sender as spam, then all e mails from them go into a spam folder. They can then be ignored and deleted

[Ethel]

My gmail does that too - and I can filter senders so they are automatically deleted and never even reach a folder, so very easy to ignore.

[Loosehead]

It's very simple to be untracable, set up a Hotmail account and send email via an Internet cafe, no way to trace that back to anyone!