Re: Distressing, possibly life threatening emails from free accounts (yahoo, hotmail

In my five years of handling e-mail incidents here at Gonzaga, I have yet to have an ISP that gave up their user information without a court order. I have had several ISPs willing to contact the perpetrator and send them a warning once we sent them the headers of the messages.

The nice thing about having the IP address from the headers is that it gives you a general idea where the sender is physically located. In some cases, we've had one student send another another student an harassing e-mail through an "anonymous" web-mail site from their dorm room! Having the IP allowed us to catch the person quickly and easily.

In other cases, we've had someone send the messages from across the country. When we mention the general location (the city, state) to the victim, they often have an idea of who sent the message.

Sometimes these things pan out and other times they don't. All in all, it's just a crap shoot since it's so easy to get pretty anonymous e-mail accounts that will be difficult to trace with or without a court order.

Greg

Greg Francis                                Gonzaga University
Sr. System Administrator                    Spokane Washington
francis@gonzaga.edu                         509-323-6896

On Fri, 30 May 2003 jrd@gerdesas.com wrote:

> In previous mail, khayes@eastbay.com spouted...

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