There’s a Way to Track Who Sent You That Anonymous Email

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Want to get to the bottom of who sent you that anonymous email? Concordia University professor Benjamin Fung and his team devised a strategy to find out who the author of that unsigned note is, according to Gizmag.

Using patterns found within the email, such as typos, spellings and other idiosyncrasies, scientists can find a style fingerprint which they call a “write-print.” It tells them the education level, gender and nationality of the anonymous writer. sOOOO ThERe iS SuMTHIN 2 WRItiNG lIKE tHiS.

Fung tested out his method on ten employees from the Enron Email Dataset – over 200,000 emails between 158 Enron employees. Using a smaller sample of 100 emails (ten from each author), 80 to 90 percent of the time they were able to discern a culprit. They hope to use this technology to help in cybercrime court cases.

Next, I think they should devise a way to help me figure out who keeps calling my phone in the middle of the night.

More on TIME.com:

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