Business Email Service

Is there any way to discover the IP address used to sign up for a free email service?

Like yahoo!, hotmail, gmail, etc. I need to know *where* the person (their computer IP address) was when they created the account? If it's difficult for an individual to do, Is this information something that you can have subpeonaed by a judge? Or is there no way possible to discover the IP?

Public Comments

1. i dont think theres somthing that would store all that in because that just takes to many gigs for every person that does it so doubt it
2. it's protected information to the public, however, you can get a court order to provide the information. i had a teacher that posted an anonymous blog about a church. even though it was accurate and supported, the church got a court order for google to turn over the information. specific to the IP address when they created it, if it was a long time ago, the records may be purged, but they do track logons, so any recent activity is recorded.
3. All those companies you mentioned keep records of the original IP used to create an account. That is how they track people who make say 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 accounts, then they can ban all of them made by the same IP. Anyway, yes that information is kept by companies. These companies have tens and hundreds of terabytes of hard drive space to supply millions of people with space for free email but they can't store private user info. You're kidding me right.
4. When created, or where they recently logged in from. While some services might retain the first ip, i strongly doubt it unless they only recently opened the account. Its just to much for most companies to store without good reason. You'd have to get a subpoena. Usually those aren;t granted without really good reason such as to find a serious criminal.