can someone use my ip address to send emails and would the emails be trace back to my computer or the computer the person is on

Hello Gianna,

If your IP address is known [ie xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx] and it is a static address [ie it is always the same] I think it is possible to find the owner name eg., gianna.something.com

Someone could then send you an email at anything@gianna.something.com unders ome circumstances.

If you send me a Private message on site, with your IP address [ie. confidentially] I will try to see if I can send you an email - I have the software to do it. I will do this only if you trust me totally [I claim that you can, I promise you].

Note that if your IP address is 'dynamic' [this is usual unless you pay extra for a static address] rather than 'static', it changes every time you use the net [though it may sometimes 'pick' the same address by chance]. Then any mail sent to that address will not go to you.

Here to help if I can, Bill

thanks for your help ok what if someone was useing my email address and my ip address and i had my ip address trace would it tell me who's useing it my email address is ?????????????

Hi Gianna

I've removed your email address.
You could get millions of emails by posting it like that!
Anybody in the world could come to this site and see your address! [not now!].

I presume you could not send me a private message because you are a visitor?
You should be able to find the address of the person who sent you the email, but you would need special tracing software to do that - I can't do it!

What you can do is look at the 'header information' of the email sent to you and see if there is a senders "real address" in there.

To see the header depends on your email program. Usually, if you right-click on the email [in your email program] you should get a pop-up menu. On that menu, you should have an option 'view header'. If not, try reading your email prog help file.
If you can select that option, you should see the whole email including the header information [in a new window].
That will show you the route taken by the email, with every step shown and the source.
Unfortunately, it seems that it is possible for unscrupulous senders to include false names and addresses in this information. So you need to be very careful before you start slanging someone off.

Hope this helps a bit, Bill.

very informative Bill. The only thing I'd like to add is that it's very easy to forge the sender's email address and name on an email (and this, as most everyone knows, is common practice of spammers and viruses), but looking at the full header information will almost always reveal the real source of the email, unless the person is using an anonymous remailer.

I'm not sure what you mean, gianna, about someone using your IP address to send emails. Maybe you could give us a concrete example or more info?

my boyfriend mother has been getting some nasty emails and she had them traced or something and it's comming from my ip address but i never sent them

3 possibilities come to mind:

1) If you go through a proxy server (like AOL users do), then oftentimes many users (who use the same proxy server) have the same IP address, and so if the IP address gets traced back to you (or matches your IP address), then that doesn't necessarily implicate you as the sender, but only says that the email originated from someone using that proxy server.

2) If you're certain that your IP address is uniquely yours, then it's likely that someone is accessing your computer to send out emails.

3) This is very unlikely, but must be considered if the other two options are ruled out: it's possible to forge the IP address in the email header so that it looks like it originated from your IP address.

so someone could use my ip on there computer to send emails and it will still be trace back to me even though there on diffrent computer

this possibility is so unlikely that, unless they're a programming/computer guru (or the equivalent), you can rule it out.

ok what if someone has hack into my computer and was sending emails would it trace back to my computer or there computer

ginna. i like that name.do you know a lona smith?

A friend of mine got an email sent to his girlfriend back home saying that he was cheating. He told us that he traced the email of the anonymous note to Hamilton where the girl he was cheating with at university lives. The two cheaters are at university and the real girlfriend is at home. How would it be possible to trace the IP address back to Hamilton where she was this past weekend when it was sent?

The IP address of the computer sending out the email is almost always in the full header of an email. This IP address can almost always be traced back to the physical location of the computer using traceroute. Put 2 and 2 together.