Find the Person Behind an Email Address

You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without directly asking the other person?

Web search engines are obviously the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will probably be of little help.

No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.

#1. Find the sender’s location

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender.

#2. Reverse email search with Facebook

Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.

Unlike LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.

If you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile picture and then upload it to TinEye – it’s a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.

#3. Check all the other Social Networks

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

If the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com, there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.

#4. People Search

Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

Other than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.

How to Capture Videos of Google Earth

This is a short video animation captured using the free version of Google Earth.

The video in high-resolution (720p HD) and the animation plays very smoothly but before I share the actual software that I used to record this movie clip, please read the guidelines for using content from Google Earth and Google Maps:

[Offline use] If your proposed offline use of Google Maps or Google Earth is limited in scope, the concept of ‘fair use’ may apply

[Online use] You do not need permission to create and display video created from Google Maps or Google Earth in a video, whether hosted on your own site or through a service such as YouTube. You must purchase a copy of Google Earth Pro if exporting motion video, because screen capturing is not allowed.

If your usage meets the ‘fair use’ criteria, you can use the free Wegame client to record movies of Google Earth on your Windows machine. Wegame, a popular tool for recording video games, was recently updated and it now supports full-screen recording at 30 frames-per-second for smooth video.

Unlike most other screencasting software where you just hit the Record hotkey to start recording, it may take a couple of tries for you to get comfortable with the Wegame capture process.