annoymous email

[jock.strap]

is it possible to send one. If you send one from your hotmail account. Can they still trace it back

[Buenchico]

It depends who 'they' are.

Emails sent by, say, terrorists or child pornographers can be traced to their senders (unless those people also use additional anonymising techniques, such as Tor ) by means of the relevant authorities serving a series of court orders on various internet companies.

If you're using a Hotmail account, with your real name as part of your email address, it would be hard to make it truly anonymous. (If the recipient is using a client such as Outlook Express, simply right-clicking and selecting 'Properties' should show its origins).

If you create a new Hotmail account, with an anonymous user name, the recipient won't know who sent it (unless, as stated above, they've got the ability to serve court orders on Hotmail and your ISP).

Personally, I've got dozens of free email accounts with Gawab, so that (for example) an email address I might use here on AB can't be linked to the address that I might use on another forum. If you'd like to use Gawab (instead of, or as well as, Hotmail) see paragraph 3 onwards of my post here:
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Technology/Inte rnet/Question407429.html

Chris

[Lew]

Not true

Any email sent can be traced right back to the computer that wrote it pretty easily

A normal person with a little computer knowledge can trace it back to show the isp it was sent from.
If the email is a type that's likely to get reported to the police, they can then ask the isp who was using that ip address at that time and date .
Pretty simple stuff and dont think deleting traces can stop them doing that.

The only way to stop emails being traced back to an individual computer is use something like the fixmyownpc cd from http://www.fixmypcuk.com

Using one of the annonymous email programs wont work as by law records have to be kept for 6 years now, isp's and email suppliers so everything can be traced.

an example of the hidden header in an email...

This is JUST AN EXAMPLE

Received: (qmail 17860 invoked from network); 5 Feb 2008 00:12:49 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO pre-smtp32-01.pro.mesa1.secureserver.net) ([10.0.12.150])
(envelope-sender <[email protected]>)
by smtp07-01.prod.meta5.secureserver.net (qmail-1.25) with SMTP
for <[email protected]>; 5 Feb 2008 00:12:49 -0000
Received: (qmail 6032 invoked from network); 5 Feb 2008 00:12:49 -0000
Received: from web62106.mail.re1.yahoo.com ([64.143.72.266])
DomainKey-Signature: a=raa-sh22; q=dns; c=noxws; s=s3334; d=yahoo.com;
X-Mailer: YahooMailWebService/0.7.260.1
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 2009 16:12:39 -0800 (PST)
From: Bob Wymoo<[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Email Forwarding Help
To: Bob Test <[email protected]>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="0-1923-12965"



Lots of info in there that says a lot of information including what IP add