People typically use multiple messaging systems and send text messages concurrently by different messaging systems such as SMS, email, Twitter, and Facebook. This means that these forms of messaging systems are highly integrated into people's everyday activities. Moreover, forensic science has had many challenges in many different kinds of crimes, differing from physical crimes to computer mediated crime activities. Identification of suspects has become crucial for law enforcement due in particularly to the anonymity that the internet and associated services provide and identify the ownership of messages. In this paper, survey the development of existing author identification have been done by establishing a comprehensive review of author identification to determining the core approaches and techniques utilized. Furthermore, this study also examines possible challenges in author identification and points to some of the open problems which need to be tackled.