When Gmail first jumped onto the web based e-mail scene a few years ago, its service was available only to those who had been invited to use the service. Now it is free to anyone who wishes to use it and it has become one of the most popular free web based e-mail services on the internet. This is due largely to its large storage space and extra features like POP3 access and chat. Of course, Gmail is also very attractive to cyber stalkers and like other web based e-mail services, is popular among those who use e-mail to send uninvited harassing or annoying messages to others.

If you have been receiving unwanted e-mail from a Gmail address, there are steps that you can take to find out who has been sending you the e-mail and get them to stop.

Your first step should be to use the reverse e-mail search offered by Gmail itself. This is because it is easier for Gmail to search its own e-mail records than it is to get them to reveal information to an outside source. If you are a Gmail account holder yourself you might also have more leverage than you would as an "outside" e-mail account holder. Try using Gmail's reverse e-mail lookup system to see what kind of information you can uncover about the identity associated with the e-mail address that has been sending you unwanted e-mail.

If you don't have much (or any) luck with the Gmail reverse e-mail search system, there are a lot of independent reverse e-mail search systems on the World Wide Web. A simple search with any of the major search engines will turn up plenty of different search systems in which you can look up the identity that has been assigned to the e-mail address that keeps turning up in your e-mail inbox. The key in this search is to be tenacious. Do not give up if you don't find out who has been sending you unwanted e-mail with your first reverse e-mail search. One search service might have an easier time of accessing Gmail's records than others.

If the e-mails feel particularly malicious you might consider hiring a professional to run a reverse e-mail search for you. Gmail is especially attractive to the cyber bully because Gmail will strip the senders IP information from the header. Thus the Internet stalker thinks that he cannot be identified from a header trace.

While it is true that the header information from a Gmail email is useless in tracing their identity. That does not mean that it is impossible to identify and locate the sender of a Gmail email.

Every time a person uses the Internet or signs up to an online service and enters their email address, they leave a footprint and that footprint can be tracked and traced back to the sender. The professional investigator has developed years of sources and resources in order to obtain this information that may be unavailable to the average person.

There is also something called the "deep web" and this information is not accessible by a simple goggle search but it is available to a seasoned investigator that has spent years developing methods to search these areas of the web.

So a Gmail account may be more difficult than the average reverse email search. It may even be too difficult for the average person to trace but It's by no means impossible for a professional that specializes in email tracing

Copyright (c) 2008 Ed Opperman