Can you check whether a certain computer has accessed an email account?

My fried and I are having a debate about the below:


If you know somebody's email password and access their account on the internet, is there anyway that the actual owner of the account can check which machines have accessed their account (ie by recording the IP address)? I do not think this is possible but my friend thinks it is possible and relatively easy to do. Who is right?





Thanks for your answers.

Can you check whether a certain computer has accessed an email account?
I don't think so. It probably depends on the type of email though. If you use the email service provided by your isp, I'm sure they keep logs of who connects to their news server. I doubt they would ever hand over the logs to anyone though.
Reply:well, you can create a free account on geocities.com, create a dummy HTML file that contains Statcounter or Google Analytics tracking script.





1. Set up a Hotmail account in US and and a second email account with a non-U.S. provider. (eg. Rediff.com or IndiaTimes.com)


2. Send messages between the two email accounts which might be interesting to the email snooper or NSA who may be monitoring your email.


3. In each message, include a unique URL to a Web server (link to the dummy file on geocities.com containing the tracking code) that you have access to its server logs. This URL should only be known by you and not linked to from any other Web page. The text of the message should encourage an NSA monitor or email snooper to visit the URL.


4. If the server log file ever shows this URL being accessed, then you know that you are being snooped on. The IP address of the access can also provide clues about who is doing the snooping.


by the way, you can also track a computer by its domain name, IP addresss, and the computer host name.


Domain names are similar to vanity phone numbers where words are assigned to represent the phone number. Domain name is a text name that a computer network registers for the numerical ID of the computers in the network. The domain name is used to give computers text names rather than using the numeric IP addresses. Domain name examples are Abika.com, cnn.com, usatoday.com. Computer (host) name are names given to individual computers. Each host name corresponds to an IP address. Host names and domain names are optional and everything can work fine with using just IP Addresses. Examples of host names: www.cnn.com, mail.people.com, blahblah.sbcglobal.net and so on. if you know the IP, you can find out its ISP.
Reply:Well if your friend has the talents of a hacker you can probably see if another IP address was used to get into your mail. It still doesn't prove much. For instance if you accessed your email from another computer than your own...it is only a computer address, not a personal address.

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