Reverse e-mail search – ID theft protection?

With the proliferation of cheap email accounts, it is very easy for one person to set up multiple email accounts. With POP and SMT, you can set up one central e-mail account and have all the others forward to that one central account. Many people have one e-mail for friends, another for people you may not like, a disposable e-mail account for potential spammers, and another for business associates that looks better on a business card than hotlover67@pickaserver.com. Unfortunately, the proliferation of accounts can make it harder to keep track of what e-mail addresses belong to whom. When I was contacted about someone upset about an email I sent, my first thought was ‘I don’t remember writing anything like that’. I asked them to forward the offending message, so that I knew what they were talking about. There was an email address, with my first and last name as part of the email address, and a rather contradictory set of statements on politics and business. There were two possibilities. First, someone created a fake account with my name embedded in. Think digital fraud. Second, someone with the same name had used their name in the e-mail format and sent the message to someone we happened to both have contact with. This is where reverse email search came in very handy. The search took a very short time. It turned out to trace to a legitimate person of the same name. With that information, I was able to hand that information to the potential client. Yes, someone by this name wrote it, but I was not the one who wrote it. I never thought reverse email search could protect me in potential ID theft situations.