You need to find out as much information as you can from someone who is E-Mailing you so you can properly report them. The solution is simple.

Setup a server with Apache, PHP, and mail functionality. Then create a small PHP script.


<?php
date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
$viewer_date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
mail("[email protected]", "Information On Person", "The person viewed your message on: $viewer_date");
?>


The above is pretty simple. The date_default_timezone_set sets the timezone for your server to the timezone of your choice. In my case I have it set to New York. This way I know exactly what time in my time the Person Viewed my reply to them via E-Mail.

We can change the format of the date, if we choose to. The current date we have formatted is YYYY-mm-dd HH:MM:SS where Y is year, m is the number of the month, d is the number of the day. And our time displays seconds. If we don’t want seconds we would simply modify our date to look like date('Y-m-d H:i').

Note: It is important to remember to put your E-Mail address where it says [email protected] in the script. Using the one I provided wont work and adding the other persons E-Mail address will result in them getting the info and not you.

Okay but that just gives some basic info. Lets find out what web browser they are using and what operating system they are using. As well as getting their IP Address.


<?php
date_default_timezone_set('America/New_York');
$viewer_date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
mail("[email protected]", "Information On Person", "The person viewed your message on: $viewer_date using $user_agent and with the IP Address: $ip");
?>


Now we have quite a bit of information on the person. And we can gather even more if we wanted to. Now we need to get this to work in an E-Mail. This can be achieved by using the HTML IMG tag. And we need to use HTML not attach an image. So we will add the following HTML code to our E-Mail that we will be sending out.

<img src="http://locationofourscriptwe.com/made.php" />

And then when we send the E-Mail out to someone, and they open it up, we will get an E-Mail telling us all the information that we added in our PHP script. Now if you need to report this person to the authorities, you can provide them with all the information about the person that they may need, giving them a better chance of taking action.