Is anyone else reading your email ?
Is your boss or even some coworker secretly reading your email ? Are the Federal
agencies snooping your email messages ? 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.
Remember that for steps 3 & 4, you can create a free account on geocities.com,
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. Rediff.com or IndiaTimes.com)
2. Send messages between the two email accounts which might be interesting to the
email snooper or NSA who may be monitoring your email.
3. In each message, include a unique URL to a Web server (link to the dummy file on
geocities.com containing the tracking code) that you have access to its server logs.
This URL should only be known by you and not linked to from any other Web page. The
text of the message should encourage an NSA monitor or email snooper to visit the
URL.
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?
utmt=imp&utmac=C&utmcsr=news1&utmcmd=email&utmctr=em&uctr=k">
The email impressions would be credited to the source "news1" and the medium "email".
As soon as someone ones 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" <click
here</a>
Update: According to NYT, the volume of information gathered from telephone and
Internet communications by the National Security Agency without court-approved
warrants was much larger than the White House has acknowledged.
Americans come to the program's attention only if they have received a call or e-mail
message from a person overseas who is already suspected to be a member of certain
terrorist groups or linked somehow to a member of such groups. And the agency still
gets a warrant to intercept their calls or e-mail messages to other people in the
United States.
Source: How do I track email campaigns? | Who
is snooping on my email? - confirm if one's email messages are being read by
someone else.
Disclaimer
posted by Chazzsongs at
5:28 AM
