Has my friend been electronically stalked?
 

Is it possible to get someone's personal email address even if they haven't listed it anywhere on the net, and their Real name isn't associated with it?

A friend of mine has her First name and the first initial of her last name associated with her MSN hotmail account.

She has deselected all of the options for showing her profile on the interne so that someone can't find her, yet some how someone has. I am sure the address wasn't given to who found her, so I'm kind of freaked out by this.

I've searched all over google and yahoo looking for references to her nickname or email address and there are 0 results.

Could someone have hired a detective or something that could have found her email address some devious way??

Or is there someway to search ALL of MSN's user list? I tried searching for her First Name Last Initial on MSN's member directory, but it requires the full last name which I know she never put in..

Thanks for the help..

Has she used that e-mail adres to forward funnies?
(sounds stupid, but a lot of times those types of mail get forwarded endlessly with all e-mail addresses attached....)

In short.....Yes, someone could.
In reality.....no one would.

The amount of knowledge and time needed to find someone in this way is a waste of resourses only the government would consider, and even then the individual would have to be worth the effort.

Nothing on the internet is 'private' as such.

I know of someone who keeps a blog but doesn't announce it except to her very close peronsal friends; she uses it to keep her personal friends up to date on what's going on in her life.
A blog by nature is public, and she expects complete strangers to read it but doesn't expect people she knows to read it (except for the selected few). And yet, I managed to accidentally stumble upon it.

Am I stalking her? Hell No! It's just that, well, the internet is a scary place.

If your friend's email address is derived from her name, then that's pretty easy to guess.

You leak information about yourself all the time online. If someone is somewhat technically skilled, they can often get random information about you.

In this case, I'd suspect the "forward of a forward" method Silvy came up with. Either that, or the sender asked a friend of hers. Or, really, maybe the person who emailed just guessed!

Is the sender in physical proximity to the reciever, or in physical proximity to anyone the reciever might email? A glance over someone's shoulder would get an email address.

Has she ever used the email address to register on any web board, forum or other site? Some of them expose email addresses, or sometimes just the ability to send an email using the system but not the address.

The forward of a forward is quite likely.

Also if anyone has ever sent her an E-card from blue mountain or sent her an evite from that evite web site, it is quite probable that this is ended up on a spammers list with names and locations and what not.

That's what happened to me. Now most of my spams have my first name, and my gender, and I have to usually wade through fifty to a hundred spams for every legit email I receive.

I wouldn't be all that concerned about an e-stalking.

-bear

it is posible to get a list of emails and owners, it is hard, but it can be done, usualy they are people who are dumb enough to bind tehre name to there email address in some way.

ie

registering to a site that sells info with both your email and your personal name.


i would doubt that this is the case, as it is very rare and very hard.

I have no doubt that MSN or Hotmail would sell their members email address...