You receive an e-mail from a customer
- requesting information on your products, price etc.
or placing order. Normally, you would like to find
out more information about this customer before parting
with requested information, especially if the information
is of sensitive nature like price list, discount rate
etc.
There may be other occasions when you want to find
out more information about e-mail sender - for example,
to locate the identity of a spammer or someone whose
identity is suspicious.
How do you go about it ? You only have an e-mail,
which is perhaps the easiest thing to acquire in the
Internet.
Though Internet is anonymous - there are few tools
with which you may dig out some information about
your customer before entering into a negotiation.
For example - if you receive an e-mail from a 'customer'
with US postal address but discover that the e-mail
has been sent from an African country - you know what
to do !
Analysis
of Given Details
Every e-mail has at least three distinct
elements
- From: (e.g. abcd@whyme1234.com)
- To: (e.g. seller@indianproducts.com)
- Subject (e.g. Want to buy Your products)
The simplest test is to put the tail
of sender's e-mail address (e.g. www.whyme1234.com
for abcd@whyme1234.com) in your browser's window and
check if there is a web-site at this URL.
If you find a valid and business like web-site at
this URL - your job becomes easier. One can dig out
significant details from web-site as also other sources.
Please see Faida article - 'How to evaluate a business
web-site' for details.
However, if you can not find e-mail sender's web-site
at URL - do not jump to conclusion that the sender
is phony. Lot's of people use business e-mail address
without web-site. In such cases, you need to determine
if this guy is one of them or is using an anonymous
web-based free e-mail, disguised as business e-mail.
Your next task is to find out ownership details of
the domain name.
Tracing Owner
of Domain Name
Internet Corporation For Assigned Names
and Numbers (ICANN) is the nodal agency that supervises
registration of domain names. Information on ownership
of domain names can be located from ICANN approved
registrars, who maintain public access database (called
whois) on ownership of domain names.
Please visit such a whois (e.g. http://www.internic.net/whois.html)
and check ownership of domain name.
If the sender is using a business e-mail - the domain
name should be registered in sender's or his/her company's
name.
When e-mail
Sender Uses free web-based E-mail service
What happens when the e-mail sender
uses a web-based free e-mail service (e.g. hotmail.com,
yahoo.com, rediffmail.com etc.) ?
Well, you can still find information about the sender
by analyzing the e-mail header.
We shall discuss header analysis in next issue
