Once an email is deleted can it be traced by police from somewhere?

Question

I haven't done any thing wrong but I might be on to something serious and I know the incriminating emails are deleted. Can they be retraced. This is important only anwer if you know for sure.

The emails were sent using yahoo, regular mail not webmail.

Answer 1

Yes, anything that is "deleted" from your computer can be found again by a computer forensic person---they have specials all the time on court TV where they confiscate the felons computer and dig up all the deleted files.

Answer 2

No one can tell you for sure, being that we don't know how you sent the emails.

Anyway here is how it works:

When you send an email your IP (or proxy) connects to the mail server and request the email to be sent. then the server sends your email to the address requested. The server also adds a header to the email. This header has the ip address of the sender. They can trace the ip back to the isp and from there get the information on where the ip is. So if you sent the emails from home then it would be traced with ease. If you sent the emails froma public place then the ip will go back to the publiuc place. and they probly wont find out who was using what pc for what. But if you use a proxy then then they would trace it back to the owner of the proxy and if the porxy logs connections then they can get the isp and so forth.

They way you send the email is how likely you'll be traced.

FYI:
things CAN be totally deleted. You just have to know how. If things coudn't be totally deleted then your hard drive would fill up very fast. The fact that you can never realy delete somthing is a lie. A hard works the same as a cassette tape. Its all 1's and 0's. Onces You record over a tape the original audio is gone for good. This is the same for a hard drive. If you format a hard drive, that drive is clean. And no ones getting anything off of it. Its totally deleted.

forensic tv shows all lie. They can't dust a hard drive for finger prints it doesn't work like that. If the1's and 0's are gone the information is gone and no forensic's are going to be bringing it back.

It would be illegal for a hard drive to keep your information in a "private spot" for later review after you requested it to be deleted. This is NOT true.

And No emails do NOT go to a "main police pc".

unknown friend: Thats not ture. Not all pcs have a registry. And the registry is used to keep settings. Not emails.

Answer 3

Yes, but it's a bit of work. First, when you delete a message, it's only made invisible. By changing the first character of the filename to a special character, the operating system counts the space on the disk as empty, but the data is still there. Programs like Norton Utilities can still read the data. There are some programs that overwrite the data making it irretrievable.

Then, every email travelling through the Internet leaves a trace in the servers it passes through. It is possible to go to those servers and get that information, tracing it back to the originator. Still, it's a bit of work, most likely can't be done without a warrant, and not the sort of thing that casual people would try to do.

For an interesting look at headers, open your e-mail program and view the Internet Headers. Here's an example:

X-Apparently-To: [e-mail] via 68.142.206.181; Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:22:31 -0700
X-Originating-IP: [206.46.252.46]
Authentication-Results: mta107.vzn.mail.mud.yahoo.com
from=verizon.net; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)
Received: from 72.70.196.228 (EHLO vms046pub.verizon.net) (206.46.252.46)
by mta107.vzn.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP; Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:22:31 -0700
Received: from Laptop ([68.237.140.210])
by vms046.mailsrvcs.net (Sun Java System Messaging Server 6.2-4.02 (built Sep
9 2005)) with ESMTPA id <[e-mail]> for
[e-mail] (ORCPT [e-mail]); Thu,
26 Oct 2006 13:22:25 -0500 (CDT)
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:22:13 -0400
From: "Chandler"
Subject: All about me...Just for fun
To: "Timoth"
Message-id: <008301c6f92b$aa9836d0$2c01a8c0@Laptop>
MIME-version: 1.0
X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2962
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2869
Content-type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0080_01C6F90A.21DE3E00"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-priority: Normal
References: <[e-mail]>
X-NAS-BWL: Found match for '[e-mail]' on the allowed list (5 addresses, 0 domains)
X-NAS-Classification: 0
X-NAS-MessageID: 116
X-NAS-Validation: {C420940D-6840-4048-A182-50B4D80E27A7}

I changed the emails to preserve privacy, but you can see that each server the message went through left its IP Address. Each of those servers has documentation of this message as well. The details are kept for vairous lengths of time, but they are traceable for a while.

Answer 4

Yes it can be trace. If you reside in the United States your "Home Land Security", monitors all telephone calls, cell call and home and corporate computers. You don't have much personal freedom anymore after 9/11 in the United States.

If it is something criminal of interest to the security of the United States or something that the FBI, or your local police may have an interest in all they need to do is to obtain a court order with the email as evidence and the judge will issue a warrant to allow them to come into your home and take away your pc. And they do have the technology to remove every piece of data that will remain on your Hard Disk Drive. The software out there, that claims they can clean your disk is all BS. There is no software that will wipe your disk clean and prevent any law enforcement agency from pullling that data off of your HDD.

The only real way to destroy a disk is to beat it to death with a hammer.

Clinical Psychiatrist, France.

Excuse my english.

Answer 5

Everything done on a computer leaves a footprint in the registry of a computer, anyone that knows how to access that can find everything even after its deleted.

Also with Yahoo mail, open up the header in the email it gives you everything from the sender, IP addresses, server names etc. any IP address can be traced if you know how, its like a phone number to a specific computer. No two computers have the same IP address.

Answer 6

Very possibly. Most ISPs keep copies of all e-mails that traverse their systems. Deleting them from your sent items will NOT erase the trail. If they are deleted from the recipient's mailbox it may still be possible to reconstitute the e-mails from the service provider's servers. Normally this requires a subpeona or court order but even that is not absolute.

If either the sender's or recipient's systems are being monitored, an evidentiary chain is guaranteed.

Answer 7

it might be deleted from your email program.... but first of all traces of it may remain on your pc's hard drive that require specialist knowledge to remove to the extent that the police can not recover it.
second, there may be a copy of it remaining on the email server that the mail was sent through, there could be a copy of it on your own isp's mail servers if it was recieved through your isp's email account.
if it was sent through or recieved on a free email providers address then there may or may not be copies of the mail on their server... you would have to contact the specific provider and find out what their policy on this is.

even so - it would have to be something pretty serious for the police to go through the ammount of trouble needed to recover the mail and trace its origin. something on the level of blowing up tony blair or similar otherwise you will just get nowhere.

Answer 8

The police can most likely find the emails on your computer if they take it and have it checked. It's almost impossible to delete everything from your computer unless you are very technical and know the tricks and have the gadgets etc. There are other ways of finding emails besides your computer. Nothing is ever private.

Answer 9

If it is webmail, then no. If this is outlook express then yes but only because it works off of the hard drive and everything can be dug up off of the hard drive. As long as they don't get a hold of the computer. Most email names are anonomys anyway so it would be hard to prove if that name is actually that person.

Answer 10

There may be copies on each server that the e-mail was routed through as well as in some places that no one is supposed to know about. There may also be a copy in the Sent Mail where it came from and the sender may have Blind Carbon Copied (BCC:) others or themselves on the e-mail.