I want to find the actual sleeze behind an e-mail that falsely accuses
a friend of mine of lies such as child abuse (she is a business owner
who works with kids). Is there a way to find and prove the e-mailer
libelous? I know that the address given was: mymommasays2@yahoo.com.
The false name given was Sally Jenkins (yes, I know who she is, why is
she significant?).
The e-mail was sent to a very important and nationally and
internationally influential person in our business community,
therefore, this is a serious matter. He in response, alerted and
forwarded the e-mail to my friend, as he respects her greatly and
knows the accusations to be false. I have a forwarded copy of the
e-mail but chose not to show the names or further details on a public
forum.
Also, is is possible to prosecute libel from an e-mail?

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Request for Question Clarification by nenna-ga on 19 Jul 2004 10:59 PDT

Hello killerbees-ga,

If you could tell us the city, state and/or country this pertains to
it would be a lot of help in finding you an answer.

Nenna-GA
Google Answers Researcher

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Clarification of Question by killerbees-ga on 01 Aug 2004 07:27 PDT

Salt Lake City, Utah.

Normally you need to look at the e-mail header.  In outlook, you would
RIGHT-click on the message in you inbox and choose options.  A dialog
would pop up and you would see the raw e-mail message.  One of the
last entries will show
something like:    Received: from something.net ([65.43.206.64])
If you didn't know the source, that would be how you figured it out.

You can trace that IP address to the sender
http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index.jhtml
http://www.allwhois.com/  [will give you the phone number to the
server administrator]

Since we know it's yahoo.com, you can run their name and get their
contact info or look it up on their site.  Yahoo.com is very familiar
with their e-mail and other services being used for crimes.  They have
a division that deals with this and they can direct you on what you
will need to do.  Should you wish to take legal action, you can
subpoena the person's information from yahoo.  If they have provided
false info, Yahoo will still have logs of what ip addresses they use
and that can be used to trace which service provider they connect
through.  From there you will have to subpoena the records from the
internet service provider that correlate the IP address to a specific
customer, and then sue them in court.

If you don't get enough direct answers from Yahoo, you can try this
guy, James Nerlinger.  He's my former computer forensics teacher and
runs his own consulting group.
http://www.jatero.com/contact.htm

Thank you for the contact and research info. It will be put to good
use. Anyone know if libel can be charged if the source is from the
internet/e-mail?