Email Footprinting - Trace an Email and Collect Information from it..!

In the previous article, I wrote on Website Scraping, Website Monitoring and Website Mirroring. It contained the methodology of gathering information from a website. Similarly, this article refers to gathering information from an Email.

An Email can give us access to a lot of sensitive information. Information such as:

• Sender's Email
• Sender's Name
• Sender's Physical Location
• The Path through which Email travelled - The transfer agents in between
• Sender's IP Address
• Active Ports of Sender

and much more information about the sender can be known

These sensitive information can lead a Hacker to access many of the data about the target. So, in this article we are going to study about how to collect information from Emails.

There are in general, two methods of gathering information from emails.

• Tracing Email
• Tracking Email

And here we are going to study tracing an email. Tracking email is not the part of Email Footprinting but still we will study it later. For now, let us not go into deep about email tracking and just study only the difference between Email Tracing and Email Tracking.

Email Tracing vs. Email Tracking

Tracing generally refers to movement in backward direction while tracking refers to movement in forward direction. A common example is, when you order an item on amazon, they let you to track the delivery of that item. Hence you can track where your object is right now. That is referred to as tracking. Object is yours and you are spying on your object. While in tracing, object belong to someone else and you are spying on other's object.

When you send a mail and you start spying on it (if receiver clicked a link in your mail or if receiver opened your mail or any other activity), then it is called Email Tracking. Similarly, when you get an email in your inbox and you spy on the that email (move backwards and get information about from where the mail was sent and information of every sender), it is called Email Tracing.

Now that we know about Email Tracing and what type of information can be obtained, let us see the topic in brief.

Email Header

We know that we can obtain information about sender from Email. Think somewhat deeper.. There might be a source from which we get all these information. Yes, that source is the Email Header.

In an e-mail, the body (content text) is always preceded by header lines that identify particular routing information of the message, including the sender, recipient, date and subject. Some headers are mandatory, such as the FROM, TO and DATE headers. Others are optional, but very commonly used, such as SUBJECT and CC. Other headers include the sending time stamps and the receiving time stamps of all mail transfer agents that have received and sent the message.

Mail Transfer Agents (MTA) are the intermediate routers, computers or servers that help in transfer of email from a sender to the receiver. Generally, sender and receiver are not connected by a direct connection. Hence, we use MTAs to create a path between sender's mail box (on sender's mail server) and receiver's mail box (on receiver's mail server). To know more about How Email system works, click here..

In other words, any time a message is transferred from one user to another (i.e. when it is sent or forwarded), the message is date/time stamped by a mail transfer agent (MTA) - a computer program or software agent that facilitates the transfer of email message from one computer to another. This date/time stamp, like FROM, TO, and SUBJECT, becomes one of the many headers that precede the body of an email. Hence, there might be multiple sub-headers in an email header providing information about each MTA unit associated in the transfer.

Headers Provide Routing Information

Besides the most common identifications (from, to, date, subject), email headers also provide information on the route an email takes as it is transferred from one computer to another. As mentioned earlier, mail transfer agents (MTA) facilitate email transfers. When an email is sent from one computer to another it travels through a MTA. Each time an email is sent or forwarded by the MTA, it is stamped with a date, time and recipient. This is why some emails, if they have had several destinations, may have several RECEIVED headers: there have been multiple recipients since the origination of the email. In a way it is much like the same way the post office would route a letter: every time the letter passes through a post office on its route, or if it is forwarded on, it will receive a stamp. In this case the stamp is an email header.

An example of simple email header with only one sender an receiver tag is shown below:

Click to view full size image

The above example is the simplest header of all. But still it might look complicated to you. Hence, is proves that tracing the email manually is complex. But we need to know the manual method too, because only using automated tools doesn't provide perfection.

Manual method to trace an Email

To find the information from a received email you're curious about, open the email and look for the header details. How you find that email's header depends on the email program you use. Do you use Gmail or Yahoo? Hotmail or Outlook? 

For example, if you're a Gmail user, here are the steps you'd take:

1. Open the message you want to view
2. Click the down arrow next to the "Reply" link
3. Select "Show Original" to open a new window with the full headers

Similarly, you can find a method from Google for other Email Programs. If I write methods for all of them, article would become lengthy.

Automated Tools for Email Tracing

Here is a small list of some of the best tools for Email Tracing..

• eMailTrackerPro - http://www.emailtrackerpro.com/
• WhatIsMyIPaddress - http://whatismyipaddress.com/trace-email

You can easily search Google for other tools.

As I told, email tracking and email tracing are different. I will teach you about Email Tracking in my next article. So, stay connected..