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Email Crimes
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| Emails have enabled an efficient means
of communication, without the limitations of time zones, speed or
cost, usually associated with many of the other forms of communication.
Though advantageous in this manner, emails can easily be used for
negative purposes as well, making SPAM and virus emails a problem.
This seciton covers some basics that the everyday email user can do
to trace down an offending email sender. |
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Select one of the following topics for more information:
--> An IP
Address
--> Email
Programs
--> Email
Logs
--> Email
Headers
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An IP Address
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| IP
addresses are an effective means used to track down and differentiate
between different computers. Each computer's IP address is therefore,
naturally unique, composed of 32 bits
and grouped into four lots of eight bits. The IP address is recorded
every time your computer makes contact with a server, including when
you first log on with your ISP (internet service provider)to when
you access different web pages. Different websites also have an IP
address composed of bits, but for convenience, the long chain of numerals
is instead interpretted into an easier-to-remember word address using
a domain name service (DNS). During the trace back of an email message,
the IP address of the various protocols
used to transfer the email from one location to another can be quite
useful. |
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Email Programs
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| There are a variety of email programs
used to manage, store and compose emails. Email programs such as Outlook
and Eudora specialise in encoding and decoding received email messages,
to make them understandable, not unlike the encryption and decryption
process described in the next section, but slightly simpler. All of
the encoding is mapped to an email standard, a form of coding which
holds information for the posting of messages from place to place.
Some common email standards are MIME (multipurpose internet mail extensions)
and uuencode, of which the latter is more often used in attempts to
hide information in a message, but can be easily decoded by various
decoding utilities that come with major operating systems. |
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Email Logs
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| Email logs are generally kept on all
email servers, being a record of the emails which were sent, received,
the email addresses involved and the time/date of posting/receipt.
However, it may be a problem if some servers
use what is known as circular logging, where a certain amount of data
space is allocated for the storage of log files, but once this space
is full, the beginning (earliest of the log files) is overwritten
and this overwritten data is deleted for good. The log files are commonly
formatted into just plain text and their main use is for identifying
the source of the offending email/s. Different email servers have
different forms of email logs, but the information these files provide
are the same. |
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Email Headers
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| Email headers prove
information not unlike that of an email log, but details the path
the email took in terms of which protocols were used to transfer the
messages and thus work backwards. The return path of the email, the
email address to which your email program will send a reply, is often
not the source of the message when an offender deliberately tries
to disguise his/her tracks. Each email also has a unique message ID,
which may correspond to data contained in a message log. This information
is not normally shown by default, but is easily accessible in most
email programs. For example, Microsoft Outlook displays this information
when the property of an email is displayed and 'view source' is chosen.
The screen to the left is an example 'message source' of the welcome
message Microsoft Outlook sends. |
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