Anyway to find a person behind an email?

[madfloridian]

There used to be many email directories. I can find how to search on name, but not on address. A friend got an ugly one from an unknown person, but sent from a roadrunner address. I can PM the address to someone if they are good at this.

[lpbk2713]

1. If you have it narrowed down to RoadRunner

that's about as far as you will probably get. RR won't divulge account info. You or your friend can report it to RR security if it is harrassing or if the sender is violating the law in any way. They can do something if they choose to but they may never tell you about it. They could cancel the sender's account but that doesn't mean much because the sender would just find another ISP and it would start all over again.

[RoyGBiv]

2. Depends ...

If you have the full headers of the e-mail, if those headers are not munged in any way, and if it's not faked by some method, you can get it down to the IP used at the time the message was sent.

But, unless we're talking about some sort of illegal activity, it's likely you won't get much further. Doing so would require accessing RR's logs, and unless you have a court order, you're not going to get access to those.

I've tracked people via e-mail headers before, but under circumstances likely different from yours. I'm a regular in a Usenet forum, and people who want to harass me tend to be rather stupid. They leave a trail with their Usenet messages that can be matched with the e-mail headers. If this person got your e-mail address randomly or from some sort of web forum, none of those methods would work.

OTOH, if this constitutes harassment and becomes regular, you can turn it over to your own ISP in addition to sending e-mail to the abuse address for RR. There are no guarantees that anything will be done, but there are now laws on the books in some places that define "internet stalking," and people have been prosecuted for it.