There is a lot of false information floating around about Gmail and the reverse email search. Many people seem to think that you can't identify the owner of a Gmail account using a reverse email trace report. They base this opinion on the belief that Gmail will strip the senders IP address from the headers. This is faulty thinking to say the least. First of all the IP address is not stripped from the header in every case. In fact in many cases you will be able to find the senders IP number in the header and you can traced that back to their ISP. This may also give you valuable information about the sender or at the very least the senders geographic location.
In some cases you can take that little bit of information and make a 100% accurate identification of the owner of the email address.
But let's say we need to identify the owner of a Gmail account and the headers have been stripped the IP information. All is not lost because that is only a very small part of a professional email trace report.
An experienced investigator will have access to databases with literally hundreds of millions of names and email addresses. If they investigate emails as a full time endeavor they will most likely have complied their own data base of emails on top of that.
Additionally an email investigator worth his salt will have a huge check list of online resources where people sign up for accounts using email address that have to be verified before they can open an account. Sometimes these accounts are directly connected to banking accounts or credit cards.
But even if it's a brand new email account and it was only created for the specific purpose of stalking and harassing you it's still possible to identify the Gmail account owner using good old fashioned investigative techniques. The kinds to tricks and traps that have been used for years by investigators to locate dead beats, runaways and bail jumpers. Many of these methods have been used successfully on a daily basis all over the world long before email was ever in popular use. Now with the Internet these tried and true proven methods are even more successful and even faster than ever before.
So don't believe the hype that Gmail is untraceable but don't let the cyber stalkers know that.
Copyright (c) 2011 Opperman Investigations Inc
Will A Reverse Email Search Investigation Work On A Gmail Account?
by: Ed Opperman
