How to track e-mails?

[June.H]

I thought there was no reliable way to track e-mails from particular senders, but my friend is claiming there's a company that says they can, even from a Hotmail account.

I read that spam works so well because people are able to forge e-mail headers?

Did I miss something, or is there really a way to track e-mails?

[ZAEN]

USA PATRIOT Act - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[-mex-]

Oh zane you're so silly

[ZAEN]

Crazy Silly.

But more importantly, crazy.

[DeusExMachina]

Email headers is still your best friend. Emails from hotmail aol yahoo google cant really have forged headers because the email you write through that SMTP has to go through their server and to forge headers like that would require changing settings in the mail server. If its an email from a domain server which the sender can control and change settings, it is possible to mask IPs etc but your email server should generally deny those types of emails. Hotmail, google, yahoo mail generally won't give information location-wise as where the email sender is unless its a criminally evident email that is being investigated by a law enforcement agency, but they should be able to.

[karppa]

I would assume that one would need to be a super elite hacker to track where e-mails are coming from, and from which IP address. Heck, it'd make things easier on me to track where all the spam bullshit I get is coming from. XD

[June.H]

Originally Posted by DeusExMachina

Email headers is still your best friend. Emails from hotmail aol yahoo google cant really have forged headers because the email you write through that SMTP has to go through their server and to forge headers like that would require changing settings in the mail server. If its an email from a domain server which the sender can control and change settings, it is possible to mask IPs etc but your email server should generally deny those types of emails. Hotmail, google, yahoo mail generally won't give information location-wise as where the email sender is unless its a criminally evident email that is being investigated by a law enforcement agency, but they should be able to.

That's what I was wondering about. But does that mean that if you want to track an e-mail document from someone you don't know (that wasn't blocked by a spam filter), it'll be 100% accurate?

[DeusExMachina]

if the mail came from a major email provider, such as google.com yahoo.com or hotmail.com then yeah it wont be possible to fake the headers and it will be traceable. Any other obscure email site and provider it would be iffy.