[SassyKat]

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 – it had his email address as the sender to prove it.. I thought this highly unlikely and asked the first person who insisted he had not sent or shown it to anyone else, in fact he had not been online since just after I sent him the email until an hour or so earlier.

I asked the second friend to send a copy of the received email to me in order for me to check the full header and determine the ip address of the sender, which he reluctantly (it seemed to me) did. 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 forwarded to – the second friend! He pointed it out to me as soon as I received the copy 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 an email has been sent by someone else.

Grateful thanks in advance for your reply.

[NeedKarma]

Very unlikely. "Hacking" an IP does not mean that someone has access to your computer. For someone to access the Sent Items then they would have to open the program such as Outlook Express (you don't mention what kind of mail account it is). Spoofing the sender info is doable but still not for the generic computer user. Basically, per the scenario you mention, your computer has not been hacked unless someone installed a keylogger.

Here is Curlyben's standard copy/paste for computer cleaning:

Originally Posted by Curlyben's maintenance tips
When was the last time you did some serious maintenance on your system ?

System maintenance includes:
Defrag
FULL patching
Virus scanning
Spyware scanning
removal of rubish files

Defrag is an inbuilt function in XP.
Open My Computer > Right click C: > Tools Tab and its there.

To make sure everything is running fine run both anti virus and anti spyware apps in normal AND safe modes. (make sure that they are updated first ! ) (AVG is good and free AV)
(A couple of good removal tools are Spybot and Adaware)

ALso an on line virus and spyware scanner is Trend Housecall

Just a note; actively running two AV's on one machine can cause problems.
So if you are thinking about it make sure your current one is disabled first.
Same thing applies to online scanners as well.

Removal of junk files is easy with CCleaner a free app that does exactly what

If all this fails then a repair install may be in order:

Here's the official Micro$oft way of doing it,
and Here's one with screen shots.

Basically this installs windows over the top of your current setup.
So you don't loose any information you already have.

[SassyKat]

Apologies if I was unclear on several matters, let me add a few details. The original email was sent from one Yahoo address to another, however the second friend uses Outlook for his email management. As regards computer competence level he works in Computing at Management level and has several high level qualifications in both Computing and IT. He also knows just about everything there is to know regarding my computer, including the Administrator password (now changed) as I sent it to him when I had major problems and he fixed it for me. He also knows every part of my ip and dns address as we speak by email almost every day.

I am completely up to date with both anti-virus and anti-spyware, I defragged my entire system only three days ago and I run CCleaner on an almost daily basis.

What I am most worried about is that the "anonymous troublemaker" and my second friend are one and the same person...

[NeedKarma]

Seems like social hack versus a computer hack. Nothing we can do from here.

[SassyKat]

Well all I was asking was whether what I asked is possible - i.e. whether a person can change their ip and dns address to someone else's to make it look as if the email came from them when it really didn't, that's all.

[NeedKarma]

Well all I was asking was whether or not what I asked is possible - ie whether a person can change their ip and dns address to someone else's to make it look as if the email came from them when it really didn't, that's all.

One can spoof headers, though not easily. DNS server settings mean nothing, they are not secret nor is your IP.

[Curlyben]

Spoofing E-mail headers is scarcely straightforward.
Also bear in mind that using a webmail account such as Yahoo the header information relates to the e-mail server and not the person sending it.