tracing sender of hotmail message

[beeswax]

late last night a nasty little message was sent to one of our staff via a hotmail account set up for that purpose. Has anyone had any experience of tracing, or is it possible to trace, the sender of this diatribe? I had a look round msn last night but couldn't see much help. Any help on this would be appreciated, even if only to say, "Nope, it can't be done", which I suspect may be the case.

[GrumbleDook]

email Abuse@ ... they delete teh account and if it is one that appears to be seriously nasty they contact the ISP who will investigate ... but they have to initiate that part.

HTH
HAND

[beeswax]

wilko, and thanks

[webman]

Messages from Hotmail will contain the source IP address in the headers in the X-Originating-IP section, although how much good this will be to you is another matter.

[tom_newton]

webman's right - this will at least tell you if it came from within the school's network, and that's your best chance of finding the culprit (assuming a web filter that logs user/ip/time).

Other than that it can tell you the ISP - do whois - and they *might* help.

[pete]

We had this in September (kid-to-kid). Be prepared to sit down with a police officer (if one visits the school) and explain what the email headers mean.

Tiscali were rather helpful, other ISPs may vary.

Fun fact: (our local) police officers are very enthusiastic about crimes they haven't handled before. Rather like edugeeks are with new hardware.

[_Bat_]

If you need any extra help on this matter, I know a guy who works for the MSN department of microsoft and has direct access to the hotmail backend. He has helped me with problems a little bit like this in the past.

[beeswax]

thanks for all the info. I should have added we use MDaemon.
As for police and new incidents, I was driving down a road several years ago when a van pulled out without looking, resulting in my ploughing into the side of it. Luckily, there was a police car coming the other way and they witnessed the whole incident. Naturally they pulled over and rushed to my aid babbling that they'd never witnessed an accident before and how lucky they were etc before seeing me up against the steering wheel. "Everything all right sir?"

[webman]

Hehe, police these days eh

Glad you lived to tell the tale though!