I have been asked about Internet harassment. I have no idea how to go about determining the origin of the e-mails. These are pretty bad and I am told the new Federal Law is in a big mess - too many claims, too few people, etc. I believe this rises to the level of criminal activity. Police have little/no interest without more info and are not willing to search for that info.

I know how to print out the "details" part of the e-mail (which presumably shows the carrier). Does anyone know how to then "translate" that info - ?

I suspect I will not be involved in this because I believe they are coming from out of State but I am pretty much lost here.

Any thoughts or experience - ?

Using the email headers you can only get as close as the email server they originated from.

The thing about email 'harassement' is that it's not like harassment at school. At school you are faced with it physically, as far as the email is concerned you could block/send to Deleted Items the sender of those emails and never see them.

You can start at icann.org. From there you can link to the regional organizations that are responsible for doling out IP addresses (ex arins.net). You can then search the regionals for the IP address to dtermine the ISP that issued it. From there, you will need to subpeona the ISP for who was assigned that address.

In the days of dialup, this was pretty ineffectual since every time someone logged on they got a different IP and keeping records of who got assigned what IP at a specific time would have gobbled up lots of space so those records weren't kept for very long. However, now with so many using broadband where the PC is connected all the time so the IP rarely changes, there is a greater possibility of tracking back to the subscriber.

Thank you, Scott - I can do the footwork on this after I figure out how to positively identify the sender. You just saved me a TON of time and research - again, thanks.