OK, so, I was starting to develop one of those really preoccupying crushes on a very vague acquaintance. It was actually starting to interfere with my life because I couldn't stop thinking about this person, looking at their pictures, Googling to admire, and so forth. I'm not sure why, but I get these every once in a while when I think someone is really amazing. The best thing for me to do is always to confess it to the person, because then I can stop creeping and either date them or forget about it. But I really don't know this person well enough to tell them. So just in order to get it off my chest, I sent the person a sort of secret admirer note (I know, I know) from an anonymous email that I use for Craigslist apartment or job searches and things like that when I don't know people and don't want them to spam me or have my name right away. Is there any way that the person can find out who sent the email? It's a Gmail account.

Do they work for the NSA?

If you'd send me your bank account information, a credit card and your SSN I can check into this a little and get back to you.

Yeah, probably not from just a Gmail address. But it would depend upon if you've used that for other public forums etc as an identifier where someone could just search for it and then see personal information that could link to you.

Yes very easily
There is a function by my email provider wherein I can trace anyone who sends me a message.

Another Gmail account?

And what do you mean trace it? Trace the location or just their name?

"Trace" in this context can mean a lot of things. Any decent email provider will do something called a reverse lookup on incoming email to ensure it's not spam; as such, any email a typical end-user receives can almost always be traced back to the originating mail provider. In most of these cases, the email address used can be tied to a mailbox still in use.

That still doesn't get the end-user an identity though. To do that, the end-user would have to contact the originating mail provider and ask for the metadata associated with the email in question -- namely, the IP from which it was relayed (if you use something like Outlook) or the IP from which the user logged into the webmail interface. Unless faced with a subpoena or a search warrant, the mail provider won't do this.

Once you've got the IP address, you can then subpoena/search warrant the ISP to whom it belongs, asking for the physical service address to which it was assigned. Once they've got that, they can presumably determine to whom it belongs.

You're probably safe.

Sure. If you gave Google your real name when you signed up for the account, or if any of your emails contain your real name, or if your email is linked to any account that is on your real name, then anyone with access to the email account could get your name. Probably the easiest way would be to acquire your password.

"If" everything is being logged a message can be traced all the way to the sending PC and the PC user account (whoever logged into that machine). At my work all internet traffic is being logged. Everything. We also have cameras so we can see who is sitting at the workstation at the time the traffic transaction took place. We record several terabytes a day and keep it for 30 days. It takes a court order to look at the stored data. What's dumb is we don't record phone calls or are required to store snail mail.

If you are using an Email client that can show all the email headers, you can see how the email can be tracked. You will see a number of "Received: from <server/pc name> by <server name>"

That will track it back to either your PC address or a "nat"ed IP address on your network.

A person can easily track this back to your city, but unless they have access to your ISP records, they likely will not get to your address.

They are also using Gmail.

Anon for this Wrote:
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> They are also using Gmail.

Irrelevant. Gmail uses the same protocols as every other ISP. All the data is there in the Email regardless of if you access the email in a way you can see it or not.

Your secret is safe, (except from the NSA, who may be having a small chuckle). :)