I was just reading about the neat tricks you can do with htaccess at http://www.hostingmanual.net/other/htfun.shtml (Thanks for posting that link, RonnieTheDodger!) and saw the section on blocking access to your site. It says,

If you want to deny access to a particular individual, and you know the IP address or domain name that the individual uses to connect to the Internet, you can use .htaccess to block that individual from your web site.

and then gives the code. This brings me to my question. How do you ever know someone esle's IP address? Especially if it's someone you want to block - it's probably not someone you can ask to use their computer and check...

I get the feeling I'm missing something big.

I know I can look at my referrer logs, but that gives me IP addresses that I have no idea who they are associated with. I have some old email from the "bad people", but that's in an old hotmail acct.

What do the serious web people do? How are they be able to catch the IP addresses they want?

Thanks,
AmyD

wow- I can't believe it. I just found hotmail's mail option of displaying IP addresses. I didn't expect to get that from a free service. So I brought up some old messages and found 4 IP addresses (on messages ranging from Jan 03 to Feb 04). I know they have at least two computers, and I know which building the messages come from based on the email address, generally. Two of the IP's match each other in the first two octets, and the other two match each other in the first three octets. I guess I'll block all 4.

Still, more thoughts on the general subject are appreciated. I guess I'm lucky I saved the mail.

<edit>
ok. I better start using the edit feature before I have a really long conversation with myself. I just ran a test between my yahoo and hotmail accts, to see if it's really my IP I'm seeing. What I found is that there are two "received" lines - the first one seems to be associated with yahoo or hotmail or whatever and the second one is mine. When I look at their IP's, there's just that first one (they use aol) and the second received line doesn't include an IP. So it looks like I still don't know their IP address.
If I can do the blocking, that'd be just keen, but it's really not all that important. More than anything though, I'm using this as a project to learn my way around the topic. So if anyone has thoughts on it or good websites to recommend where I can read and learn more, that would be great.
Thanks!</edit>

Well, I know that if you're running a forum, if you're a moderator/administrator for it, it will display the user's IP address.