I’m usually a pretty open person by nature and I’m rarely suspicious of someone’s ulterior motives. This was until, of course, I recently received a strange email in my inbox. It was a friend invite that just seemed wrong, in my experience if someone wants to be my friend they could send me a facebook invite and all is well. This led me down the path of asking if it’s possible to do a reverse email lookup.
Since I have used reverse phone lookup before due to a debt collector calling about one of my cousins, I was wondering if reverse email lookup was also a possibility. I fired up my trusty Google and proceeded to type the aforementioned email into Google. This produced useless results at best; He only had bits of information here and there. Well, never one to be deterred, I donned my best Sherlock Holmes thinking cap and began my investigations. I learned to search company-specific emails for scraps of information, then learned I might have to run some crawls from the email address to see where it originated from. I then discovered that email addresses are typically used for many things, like signing up for a website or forum, and I can use this information to create my own variation of a reverse email lookup.
In the end, I found so many databases that I spent more time clicking the bookmarks button in Firefox than doing the necessary detective work to find out who this email was from. After a few hours I was able to deduce that this person did know me! She was an old friend from high school, and since Facebook really only checks from high school, I could see how a Facebook invite would have been something that wouldn’t be available. After I sent her a confirmation email, we started chatting and she hasn’t even heard of Facebook! Well, after a few email exchanges, I was one of the first friend invites of hers on Facebook, and by the end of the week, I had over 100 friends.