58 People at my work received a fictitious email that detailed a conversation that never happened between a colleague and myself. The email was sent from gmail and did not identify the sender.

Is there any chance I can get a court order to trace who sent this email? Technically it's possible if Google and the persons internet provider is given a court order / warrant, whatever to do so.

The issue at this point is, I work with everyone and some very negative things were made up that I supposedly said. This has within 1 day affected my ability to work with my internal clients. My co worker that was also named in this email has suffered physical effects of this (physically sick, emotional stress)

Opinions?

In the US you have to suffer monetary damage so I am not sure you can sue but you should be able to take this somewhere that would deal with it appropriately if you can't sue.

In NY IF you are able to get the Police interested they will get the warrant which enables you to get the user name on the account.

In some cases an Attorney can file a "John Doe" lawsuit and get a warrant to obtain the information.

Is your monetary loss (not that of your co-worker) sufficient for this to make sense?