hi! please excuse me if this is a stupid question to ask, but im just a little on the edge right now..
i guess my question pretty much covers everything. i dont have any specialized tracking software installed and i want to find my phone. is it possible to find it by using the IMEI number somehow?
if not, is there a way to make this possible on my future phone?
thanks a lot!

Yes it can. Operators have a log of when a phone with a specific imei has logged on/off/etc. However I doubt this information can be accessed by you. At least here in Finland, the police find the phones within 2-3 weeks or so. Then another couple of months of ******** bureaucracy.

I don't think that's the answer he's looking for. Likely, you wanted to know if there's a way to send an SMS message to remotely turn on the GPS tracking and locate the phone's physical location in case you lost it or had it stolen. I know I have one of these types of applications on my Droid, especially handy after having had one Droid already lost/stolen from me a month ago. I didn't have such an app.. and now I do--and I'm VERY glad such an app exists.

Dealing with the bureaucracy of police/telco trying to find stolen goods almost never turns up anything--especially since they need subpoenas to do almost anything useful.

you can't do a thing by yourself if you haven't installed special software.

unless your device has exchange sync or similar: you'll get ip. but that doesn't probably help you much

So then the prescient question has finally been arrived at: Is there any such special software available for the N900?

Search for IAMHERE and you will find one. Seems defunct. There is another thread somewhere on maemo talk about a server and daemon setup that sends positional data at regular intevals.