What if you’re working a story and stumble across some good information in an email, but don’t know who the heck sent it?  Amit Agarwal on the tech site Digital Inspiration has a great primer on how to track down the source.

Google is a logical starting point, but if that turns up nothing, Agarwal has four more suggestions:

1.  Trace the IP address

Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received from” and are followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.

Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the approximate location of the email sender.

2.  Use Facebook

Just paste the email address of the person into the search box and  Facebook will instantly tell you if a profile exists with that email address or not.

3.  Try Knowem

You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.

4.  Plug into people search sites

Try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups, but Agarwall says Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.

We love these ideas and would welcome learning about other tricks of the trade, so please share your own tips.