How do you find out who is accessing your email?

Answer

This depends on what kind of email system you are using, but I can provide a few ideas. Keep in mind that this can be difficult, since the main way to track people on the Internet is with an "IP address". Some users can hide their real address, or their ISP like AOL hides it for them.

- The main one is to contact your ISP and ask them for the server log information for your email account. With the large free email accounts, this may not be possible.

- If you have the technical ability, what you can send yourself an HTML email that has one or more images that are hosted on a web server when you can access the server logs. Send yourself the email, and watch to see what IP address also accesses the images in the email. Once you have the IP address you can find out the ISP and request the user information, but depending on the ISP it make take a court order.

- If you can think of a way to set up a "sting", you can have someone send you an email with something that the other person will be interested in and either tell someone else, or take some action that will let you know because they could only have found out by reading your mail. For example, you could get a message that someone is giving away 100 free used computers from a corporation. Anyone can call and ask for them. Use a phone number that the bad guy won't know about, and have someone send that message to you. If the bad guy calls your friend about the computers, then you have your proof (This is a non-technical method, and the type of thing I prefer if you can figure out how to make it work).

Most people don't realize how difficult it is to "hide" on the Internet. It can be done, but the average person can be tracked, tagged, and followed by those that have some technical ability and the motivation.

First answer by Nielsencl. Last edit by Nielsencl. Contributor trust: 103 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 24 [recommend question]