My thoughts:
"Probably not."
Your Web site hosting service's server logs can usually identify the
IP address of an Internet host that requested pages or other files
from your Web site. In a small percentage of cases, that IP address is
associated with a specific person. This might happen when the
individual is an employee of a large enterprise that has permanently
assigned that IP address to a single computer and only one person uses
that computer. More often, though, an IP address is reused many times
each day. When a person dials in to her ISP to connect to the
Internet, and often even with DSL connections, she will be assigned an
IP address for that session but will lose it when she disconnects. The
ISP might be able to track down who had been assigned a given address
at a given time but would probably not disclose that to anyone unless
required by law or court order to do so.
When you receive an email message that says it is "from" a certain
person or email address, that may or may not be true. It is easy to
"spoof" email addresses. If I knew one of your email addresses I could
easily send a message to that address that appeared to be coming from
you, or from bill.gates@microsoft.com, or from
george.w.bush@whitehouse.gov.
It is possible to analyze the headers in an email message to determine
the IP address of the mail server that actually sent the message, but
that is about it. The owner of that mail server could probably
determine, from its own records, the identity of the account that sent
the message -- this is how "spammers" are identified and their
accounts closed -- but that mail server owner would probably not
disclose that info to others. |
