How easily is your home address detected when sending email and what protection is available?

Answer 1

your home address shouldnt be given or shown in your e-mail

Answer 2

It would be very difficult to discover your home address simply from your email. However, if your name is part of your email address (eg. [e-mail]) then someone can search your name on Zaba. Zaba is a "people search engine." Essentially, Zaba will give you all the publically available - and sometimes private also -information about a person. The latter includes home address and telephone. For a fee, Zaba can also give you someone's school and work history. Zaba is pretty slimey.

However, there is another complication. Though your email might not reveal your home address, there are ways to trace your email. It is relatively easy to discover your IP address. Your IP address will give away the ISP (eg. Earthlink, AOL, PeoplePC...) you use. In addition, it will also give away your general geographical location (eg. Jacksonville, Florida).

Enough about the bad news. There are two easy ways to protect yourself. First, you could use a remailer. The idea behind a remailer is, when you send an email message, the email doesn't go directly to the receipent. Instead, it takes an indirect route. Your email is randomly bounced from one server to another server until it finally reaches the receipent. All the receipent can discover is the IP address of the last server. There is an excellent article on the use of remailer at:

1. Anonymous remailer --by Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer)

There is also a list of remailers available for free at:

http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/main.htm

The second method is to spoof your email address. The idea behind spoofing an email address is to disguise your email address and make it seem like another email address. Instead of your email address, jane.doe@gmail, you can make it appear like [e-mail]. I am hesitant to illustrate how this is done because it can be used unethically. If the remailer approach doesn't work for you then get back to me and i can point you in the right direction about spoofing an email address.

Answer 3

One of the best out there is a program called "Hide IP". What it does is hides your IP address and if someone "pings" your PC it gives them an IP address from somewhere over seas. Your IP address could be something like 198.163.0.2,in the USA "Hide IP" once turned on says your "IP"address is now: 68.24.53.0.3 in Hong Kong or somewhere else.