We’ve had a large number of requests for our article on how to find where your customers are coming from if your only contact is an inbound email.  This article is extracted from The Prescott Report Volume III Issue 4. (Available for purchase) We would caution that  in some countries emails bounce around like pinballs and the accuracy of this solution is at least “subject to confirmation”. We had one correspondent whom we located by this technique in northern India when he was in fact at the very southern tip of India.  One expert we have spoken to about this suggested that our correspondent was on a dial-up connection that linked to a server facility in the north. In fact, the address you get is that of a server, not the person. Where in the world did this come from? (107)

This may be a critical matter for legal compliance, especially with respect to privacy laws. For example, Canada’s do-not-spam law (discussed in the same issue of the newsletter as this subject) has particularly nasty penalties.  Other traps are US laws regarding doing business with people in certain countries, such as North Korea and Iran.  These have nasty penalties possibly surpassing Canada’s.