I am worried my yahoo email is compromised and someone is readind my
emails. Is there a way I can find out whether someone else is
accessing my machines. What I am looking at is, is it possible to find
out the time at which my a/c is accessed and also the ip addresses
from which it is accessed. This should narrow my search to find the
person who is accessing my a/c

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Clarification of Question by inquistive-ga on 02 Oct 2003 13:33 PDT

well I know, he must have guessed my passwords. I could change my
password, But that won't help me catch the person. I am more curious
to know the intruder than to protect it from the intruder, which I
will eventually do..

Thanks,

Perhaps someone has guessed the password to your Yahoo account. You
might try changing the password to a combination of letters and
numbers that do not represent anything in particular.

Sure there is a way. How far indepth is the key. Do you just want this
persons IP address? Or do you want more indepth information like
exactly who. It would be easy to get an IP and i would suggest that if
you have your yahoo email account linked to this google answers
account, you go and delete the email so they wont see our discussion
and know your on to them. You may be able to get the ip and tell yahoo
and get them on his case and press charges etc. just depends on what
you want to do.

This is not connected to my yahoo mail a/c. so it is ok. I would like
to know the persons IP address and also it would be helpful, if I
could track down exactly who did it also.

You might want to rethink this whole thing through.

What will you do when you find them?  Beat them up?  Prosecute them? 
With all the cybercrimes being commited out there (hackers causing the
loss of millions of dollars, sexual predators, etc.), I doubt if
you'll get any attention from whatever agency goes after these types
of people.

Food for thought.

If you want to try to catch the person who is getting into your email
here are two methods.  One is technical and the other is more of
social engineering.

1. Send your yahoo mail an email from another account that contains <a
img=""> tags that reference an image on a server where you have access
to the logs.  Make sure these images aren't public to anyone else. 
The title of your email will need to be something that the intruder
will open.

When they open the message their browser will request the image from
the web server and it will be entered (with their ip address) in the
web server's logs.  You may need to get a friend to help you with this
if you don't have a server or if you aren't familiar with web servers.

2.  You could potentially create a situation where you can find the
intruder by sending your yahoo account an email from a different
address.  The email would need to convince them to do something that
would allow you to catch them.  It depends on your situation and who
you think is the likely intruder, but here is a slightly silly example
to give you an idea:

Create another email account and send yourself a message purportedly
from a friend saying that someone will be handing out $100 bills  in
the lobby of a certian building on Friday at noon.  If you are there
watching and one of the people you are suspicious of shows up, you've
probably found your culprit.  Obviously this assumes you know the
person who is reading your email.

I would do method one, but if the intruder is behind a corporate
firewall, you may only be able to tell what corporation they are
coming from (or what ISP their corporation uses).  You can lookup who
has the ip addresses from www.arin.net