Have you ever received an email from someone that seems to know you personally, but the sender’s name is nowhere to be found in the email?
It happens to me fairly often, and I’ve discovered a way to quickly determine the sender’s identity in at least some of those cases.
All you need to do is check to see if the sender of an anonymous email used that same email address to open a Facebook account. Here’s how:
1 – Log in to your Facebook account.
2 – Copy the sender’s email address from the email you received, then paste it into the search box on your Facebook page.
If that email address is connected to an active Facebook account AND it’s privacy setting is set to “Public”, you’ll see it listed in the drop-down list of search results. If not, it you won’t see it listed there.
3 – If you do see that email email address listed in the search results, click on it to display a very short “teaser” for that person’s Facebook account.
4 – Click on the person’s name to view the full account page.
There is one caveat that I need to mention here: Some people have their privacy settings configured to hide their email addresses from the public, and a hidden email address is non-searchable.
If the person you’re looking for has their email address hidden it won’t show up when you search for it, even if it’s connected to an active Facebook account.
However, most Facebook users’ email addresses are visible to the public (and searchable) by default because they either don’t know they can hide it or they simply don’t care. That means there’s at least a decent chance that you’ll be able to find the person who sent you that anonymous email on Facebook.
So what happens if the search on Facebook comes up empty? Well, you still have a decent shot at discovering who sent you the email.
If your Facebook search comes up empty, try typing (or copying and pasting) the email address into Google.
Chances are the person that’s connected to that email address will pop up on one or more of the Internet “White Pages” sites or even on a different social media site.
And by the way, the White Pages sites might still have the email address connected to that person in their records even if they use a different email address as their primary address.
Bottom line: If you have someone’s email address and nothing else, you stand a good chance of discovering who the person using that address is via a quick and simple search on either Facebook or Google.
Bonus tip: This post explains how to spot (and avoid) fraudulent emails.