Tracing email is used for monitoring email delivery to the intended recipient. Behind the scenes of every email sent in the World Wide Web, are digital foot prints or stamps that reveal a lot of information beyond the message of the writer.
The information that is digitally stamped on emails include the following: time-stamped records, date received and opened, the IP address used to send the email and the IP address of the intended recipient.
This is especially useful for companies who want to be assured that their important business emails actually get delivered and read. Companies receiving classified email would also want to know if the classified information comes from a reputable company or a scamming agency.
But email tracking or tracing can also be used by individuals, scammers, and phishers alike. A series of forwarded messages can be traced to the first sender by following a series of hops or digital stamps as the email gets sent from one place to the other. However when email tracing is used maliciously they can be intended for collecting information about businesses or individuals in order to create more effective phishing schemes, pranks, or targetted spam. In some cases, emails tracing has been used to locate people and to get to know more personal information by looking for social media websites such as myspace, friendster, and multiply.
Some people think that they can get away with anonymity by creating a Yahoo! Mail address or a Gmail account but little do they know that email tracing programs can find out the IP address of the computer that sent the mail from the Yahoo or Gmail Account.
One of the more useful applications of this is in locating spammers and illegal information and data miners and putting them behind bars. Email tracing technology has gone a long way since the beginning of the Internet.
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