Email can be traced or not?

[Candace]

Actually I was thinking that e-mail can be traced or not. I am not talking about hacking the email but tracking the emails. Mean if I am getting the unwanted email from any user then it is possible to track the computer system from where it is came from. I have asked this question to few experts but they have different answers. One says it can be tracked and the other one says that it cannot be tracked. So to finally get the answer to this question I want to discuss this topic on this forum.

[Jackson2]

According to me email cannot be tacked because when you are sending the email you not sending the emails from your computer system but from server of the email account. Because, you are using the web based mail program for sending the e-mails. I have also heard that email can be tracked by using the header of the emails. If we take a look at the header of popular email secrecies like Gmail, MSN or any other then we can only see the that the mail is originated on the server not on your computer.

[Techno01]

I totally agree with the answer but what if we send the email using the application software like Outlook or Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora. Normally these services use the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for sending the email. As per my knowledge if the email is send from the email program like these then it can be tracked. When you send the email using these services then the IP address and the machine name is added during the journey of the email. So it can be easily tracked using these services.

[Candace]

Thank you for your helpful replies, now I get the clear idea that email can be traced if they are sent using email programs like Outlook or Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora. But now days only the professional people use these services not the common people or the persons who want to harass others. So the bottom line it is difficult to trace the email from where it came from. Now I want to know how to track the emails

[Techguru01]

First of all I want to make one thing clear that if you are planning to trace the email address using the header then there is problem. Because, the header of emails cannot be trusted. So simple thing is that email cannot be traced accurately but then also you can get a little information about it from its header. The header information can be used to know the IP address and the server which is normally service provider of the email service.

[konthelion]

Do you mean that if I trace my email using the email header tracer, let's say emailtracer I would not get the exact location of the sender but the location of his ISP provider? I did not know that.

Thanks for sharing, and adding it to my knowledge