I sent an email to a good friend of mine at approximately 4.00am Sunday Morning. Less than 12 hours later another friend contacted me and said he had been forwarded the email by the person I sent it to. I thought this highly unlikely and the person told me they had not sent or shown it to anyone else. I was told by the second person that it had the first friend’s email on it, yet he denies forwarding it and I believe him.

I asked the second friend to send it back to me to check the headers and he reluctantly (it seemed to me) sent it on. When I checked the email header for the ip address from which it had been sent I found that it was the same as the one it had been sent to! The second friend saw this and said this 'anonymous' troublemaker was trying to make things even more upsetting.

However since then I have been thinking about this. The fact that the full email and attachments were forwarded to someone else in the first place means that my email account must have been hacked into and the email taken from my sent file. This is the latest episode in a string of very unpleasant emails and fake pms. However what worries me most is the identical ip addresses and I need to know for definite if this is possible. I know that it is possible and fairly easy to change the email address to look as if it came from someone else, but I am unsure about changing one’s ip address in this way. Is it possible if you have all the details to change your ip address (maybe through manually configuring the TCP/IP) to make it look as if it has been sent by someone else.

Grateful thanks in advance for your reply.