Have you ever experienced this?
You got an email from a person whom you have never interacted with before.
How would you react? What would be your next move?
Give me a high five if you would research identifying the person behind the email address! Because that’s what I do when a random email lands in my inbox from an unknown person.
Why is it important to know who is behind the email?
On average, an email user can get around 15 malicious emails per month. Hence, it is significant to be aware of the email senders.
You can do this by the process called “reverse email lookup,” where you use the email address to know the name and other details about the sender that they have made public on other platforms.
Here is how you can carry out this;
Google Search
Google search engine is the most obvious place to carry out reverse email lookup. However, sometimes you might not get the result you are looking for; this could be because the person has never used this email address on public forums.
In such scenarios, Google search will be of little help.
Don’t get stuck at this point, as there are some other ways to help you reveal the identity of the unknown person behind the email.
Facebook Search
Do you have a Facebook account? That’s a rhetorical question, right? Billions of users are using Facebook, so there is a high chance that the email sender also has an account.
Facebook allows you to locate profiles using the email address. Paste the email address on the search bar and hit the enter button; that’s it. Facebook will instantly show you if a profile exists or not with that email address.
When there is no profile with that email address, try searching with the first name and last name if the email address contains these details. However, with lots of search results displayed, you may find this process cumbersome.
Reverse Image Search
And luckily, if you are able to find the profile of the person on Facebook, download their profile picture and upload it to Google Images; This will locate their other social profile where they have used the same profile picture. So this method acts as a reverse image search engine.
Reverse Email Lookup Tools
There are many reverse email lookup tools available which you can use for fraud identification and prevention.
These tools crawl various databases and online sources to uncover the places and sites where the email address is used. In this manner, it gathers personal information about the sender.
That sounds pretty simple, right? But, first, you have to fetch the email address into the reverse email lookup tool and get the information about the user.
Final Thoughts
In the advanced technology world we live in, nothing is too hard to locate. With some bit of effort and the right tools, you can trace the person behind the email address.
