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.



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:

< href="www.mywebsite.com/?utm_source=news1&utm_medium=email">

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: | Who is snooping on my email? - confirm if one's email messages are being read by someone else.