I've been using a trick to identify abusers who used hotmail already. And
the recent Risks article: 'E-mail writer arrested for starting panic' showed
that this trick isn't as well known as I thought.
Many webmail providers I have seen tend to introduce interesting headers
into e-mail sent by them. For example, hotmail appends the following header
to outgoing e-mail. Past this, identification is trivial.
X-Originating-IP: [206.47.244.30]
Regardless of whether or not the webmail provider actually appends such a
header, they are very likely to log e-mails anyways. Thus it is very easy
for legal or political pressure to grab the logs and identify the user.
So perhaps the risk here is that people have been thinking that webmail
means anonymous e-mail.. It doesn't.
The most reliable way I can find to truly send e-mail anonymously is
through the anonymous e-mailer network. (Or maybe a mixmaster network).
If you wish to also get responses anonymously, supply a reply-block that
sends responses through a web-forwarder service dumping into a webmail
dropbox. Then access the dropbox through onion-routing.
[Scott A Crosby ]
0:00
#
G!
