How do I find where an email is from?

Information
1

How do I find where an email is from (like their location, name, any information pretty much)

3

You could attempt searching up the email online, see if any results appear and work from there.

4

  • Passively? Linked social networking accounts, data brokers if in USA, mail lists and blogs + forums to name a few. If on a custom domain you may want to check that as well for additional information. You may also want to do some basic forensics on the e-mail itself to check for obvious things like the time zone, locale, virtual fingerprints (like antivirus notices) etc.

  • Actively? You just ask. That’s the beauty of social engineering. The possibilities are endless, you may try sending a few scambaits asking for a very specific thing only an inhabitant of a country / a suspected location of a scammer might know, you may try flirting with the scammer and ask them in the course of that and yes, sometimes you can just ask nicely.

    • Of course there is the obvious and popular option of using web beacons / other user-tracking methods (look at mass advertisers for inspiration) but I will not support them as I am not sure whether it’s legal to employ these in all or any scenarios or not. Also some if not all modern mail clients will detect such attempts and filter them out and/or alert the scammer. It’s also likely that in such a scenario your mail will end in scammer’s junk folder. Please use these at your own risk.