What kind of personal info can a person with your email address get about/from you?

Question

I keep hearing that you shouldn't give your email out to strangers online, and don't see the danger. Someone please explain.

Answer 1

For an e-mail address on its own it depends on what type of e-mail address it is.

hotmail.com/yahoo.com/gmail.com - these could be used by someone anywhere in the world.

ISP e-mail address - this would usually narrow you down to a country.

Business e-mail address - would tell them where you worked. Depending on the company would narrow you down to a small geographic area.

Your own domain e-mail address - depending on the type of domain name your real name and address can be linked back.

The real danger comes from if you've got your e-mail address scattered across the web, so it can then be tracked back via search engines and tied to other information about you. In addition if the bit before the @ is pretty unique you might use that as usernames on Yahoo or Myspace etc.

The other reason is you wouldn't just give your phone number out to anyone. So why would you give your e-mail address unless there was good reason to.

Answer 2

Depends on the person, and on you.

I have known people that, given any hotmail email address, could access that persons email account. From the content in the account they can get email adddresses of friends and all the personal information in the account. Some people have names of their kids, bank information, debt information, home address, and medical information in their mail. If you dont, do your friends?

If you use an insecure provider, especially a local isp for your mail, its more likely that it can be hacked than a powerhouse like google, or hotmail.

My general approach is to use a tough provider for email (like yahoo) and to be the initiator for giving out my email addy. If I want to give it to someone I do, but if they want it from me without having to ask me, I usually just say no.

Spammers love free email addresses. When you get into their lists, you dont get out.

Answer 3

Sometimes when you set up your email addy, they ask for all sorts of personal information. If you actually filled this out in its entirety when you set up your account, then it is possible for people to hack in and get this information. Just make sure you are changing your password often. Since they can hack in, this also means that they can read your personal emails and find out even more information about you. Just be careful when you do this. Or set up a 2nd account and give that email addy to strangers....but why are you giving it to strangers anyways?

Answer 4

well people can trace an email address.
the only information they can possible get
is your internet service providers address
your city/country

but will never be able to get direct personal information.

Answer 5

that is basically about impossible to discover. Gov agencies would music (not effectively constantly) yet a elementary consumer can not. there are a number of procedures like nameless emailing etc which make monitoring ipossible.

Answer 6

It depends on what you display on your profile.