Greetings to all the members of forensic focus!
Im a newbie here and the amount of info available here is awesome.
I have a question regarding the traceability of emails.
Can one email account be traced from other ? If someone has say 5 mail accounts is it possible to find all email Ids by using the known mail id, given that person uses same computer and same internet connection to access all mail accounts.
I’m new to all this and would really appreciate your help in this. I have doubts about someone infringing my privacy.
Thanks !
To answer your questions, it depends.
With several emails, you can check the headers for the trace information, but what you find and can use depends on the email facility used…which client, service, etc. For example, Yahoo includes an "X-Originator-IP" (or similar) header, but GMail does not (I am told).
Content analysis of the emails may help, to some extent.
Does that help?
H. Carvey
"Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery"
Hii keydet89,
Thanx for replying to my query. Actually I'd find it easy if u could make the explanation less technical coz i couldn't understand all that u said.
The thing is that I have been regularly corresponding with an institute mainly using email id 1 and mentioned the id 2 in passing at times. Now I'm getting replies on id 3 which i have never mentioned and i'm pretty sure of that.
That's the reason I wanted to know if someone can track your other mail ids using given id by probably breaking into the hard disk or the mail account.
From what u replied I gather that it is possible and also that it's easy to do this with yahoo than with gmail…is tht correct?
thanks!
Perhaps some further explanation/clarification is in order here..
First off, am I correct in assuming that when you say "email id", what you're referring to is an email address?
Second, based on your last post, are you saying that you've got three email addresses, numbered 1 thru 3 for the purposes of ordering them. You've contacted someone via email address 1, and mentioned email address 2 in passing…and now you're receiving email from that person/organization on email address 3? Is this correct?
You had said: …which i have never mentioned and i'm pretty sure of that.
You also said: That's the reason I wanted to know if someone can track your other mail ids using given id by probably breaking into the hard disk or the mail account.
Yes, this is entirely possible. Of course, hard drives themselves aren't broken into, and accessing one email inbox will only divulge others if you've got information about them in that inbox.
I'm not entirely clear on why you seem to think this "institute" is responsible for this issue. Just b/c you're "getting replies" from this institute on "email id 3", that doesn't mean that anyone's broken into anything.
H. Carvey
"Windows Forensics and Incident Recovery"
Hii Carvey,
Thanks for ur patience in analysing my situation. I understand what u said.
I thought someone ws breaking into my account or my pc coz how else would thy knw about my mail 'address' which i didn't tell them….but but but ….i realised tht i only had told thm tht mail address longgg time back regarding sum othr info n tht might've still been on their database n consequently thy replied me using tht ….so the big mysetery for me gets solved with a rather bland anti-climax ending 😳 sorry bout tht 😆
Really appreciate ur patience n interest in my posts…that's an awesome job ur doing of making comp illiterates like me understand the basic issues. 😉
Kudos to U ! 🙂
thanks!