Tracking who is reading or accessing your email.
Is anyone(boss or federal agencies) reading your email secretly?
Following are two simple techniques that can help you confirm your suspicion - it detects snoopers and can track the address of the computer that is watching your email.
One of the technique goes here,
Note:-For steps 3 & 4, create a free account on geocities.com or any free web service providing site.Create a dummy HTML file that contains Statcounter or Google Analytics tracking script.
1. Set up a Hotmail account in US and and a second email account with a non-U.S. provider. (eg.IndiaTimes.com)
2. Send an message between the email accounts which might be attracting or interesting to the email snooper or anyone who is monitoring your emails.
3. The message you send,should include the URL to a webserver to which you have an access to server logs i.e link to the dummy file (containing the tracking code) located on the free web service account to which you have access(eg.geocities.com).The URL should only be known by you.The text of the message should encourage the email snooper to visit.
4. If the server log file ever shows this URL being accessed, then you know that you are being snooped on. The IP address of the access can also provide clues about who is doing the snooping.
The other technique uses Google Analytics for tracking the email impressions.
1. Create an email email message such that Urchin with the following HTML code to embed the __utm.gif image anywhere in your email message.
"<img src="http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif" title="http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif" target="_blank"http://www.google-analytics.c...?
utmt=imp&utmac=C& utmcsr=news1&utmcmd=e mail&utmctr=em&uc tr=k">"
The email impressions would be credited to the source "news1" and the medium "email". As soon as someone read your email, the impression will be registered on Google Analytics server as the gif file is downloaded on the spying computer.
2. If the email recipient has disabled automatic downloading of internet images, you can create a campaign link to track the email referrals. Tag these links using the utm_ campaign variables.
Continuing with the example above of an email message which you track using the source "news1" and the medium "email," your tagged link might look like this:
<a href="www.mywebsite.com/?utm_source=news1& ;utm_medium=email"
posted by: mercuryrising (reply)
post date: 07.18.06 (8:12 pm)
Very interesting post. Thanks for sharing :)
posted by: the327thMale (reply)
post date: 07.20.06 (5:22 pm)
Hmmm, methinks those homeland security types would probably disable referrer logging and external downloads.
If you are really worried about privacy you can always us GnuPG (www.gnupg.org) to encrypt your messages. Of course it requires that the recipient has a GnuPG enabled email client as well.