Quote Originally Posted by Phalse
I've looked around on here and I've seen many 'Fake Email' threads, but I have a question that is more generalized.
Say I get an email and want to know where it came from. I get the IP address through the header and do a lookup to see who it belongs to and I get an ISP.
--Will you ever be able to trace an email back to a computer/host name via Email, or just to the ISP?
--In that case, the only way to get information about the sender would be to get a court order to request information from the ISP, is that correct?
You didn't indicate whether it is spam or not. If it is, you can pretty much forget trying to figure out who sent it.

However, if it is from an unknown sender but it is a personalized message, you can reply with an image reference in an html message that pulls the image from a web server that you control. You can then check the server logs to see if the image has been pulled, and if so, obtain the IP address of the sender from the log. Using a reverse lookup you may then be able to obtain the general region where the individual is located.

Assuming that this is a dynamic IP address that belongs to an ISP, it would be very unusual for you to be able to obtain a court order to force the ISP to tell you who sent a single email message. Other than AOL, ISPs do not go into court willingly to provide such information.