How can a message board moderator find out my personal email address?
I used a message board from my college campus and then later, I received an email to my college email address from a moderator. I do not use that address for anything but school and have never made it public or used it to log in anywhere. Can someone find that out through my IP address? How can I protect myself? And how I can I find out who the moderator is that did this to me? Thanks.
Software/Hardware used:
Google Chrome, Mac OS X 10.7.2
Software/Hardware used:
Google Chrome, Mac OS X 10.7.2
ASKED:
October 25, 2011 7:39 PM
UPDATED:
October 28, 2011 1:49 PM
Answer Wiki:
You can find out who the moderator is through the school campus because since he was a moderator, he had to have some type of status to hold that position of responsibility, it is not something that is just given to anyone.
As to your email, there are a few ways, like WHOIS. Your IP address, unless it is static, permanent, is unlikely. He might have used it by doing a WHOIS from your other address and did a search of your name and found your other email address. Trust me when I say there are ways, many ways of finding things out.
There is a site I find that had where I lived for the past 20 years on it, and it was an open site, not a prepaid site. In today's world, unless you stay off the network, you have to be very careful of what you put out there and what you say. That is why I don't have a Facebook, Twitter, or any of those other accounts, and I change my password monthly, more than I do at work and my network at home has four firewalls on it. Call me paranoid, but I am being very careful.
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Your IP address is not directly linked to your email address. I logged in and used, for instance, six different email addresses from the same physical PC this week. So, each would have shown as having been accessed from this same IP address (which is also shared amongst over 100 other users via NAT). So, *no* direct relation.
A moderator in a forum, however, might have access to view the metadata attached to each forum post (as in sites which request your email address for anti-spam validation). I’d lean towards an abuse of authority in them simply looking up that normally hidden data.
Just an update, there is a site Spokeo, that if you input a persons name in it, you can get almost anything on them and it cost $2.95. Check it out, very scary the information out there…
@Harisheldon1960 The board is not run by the school. The board is a 3rd party. I was just using the university wifi to connect to the internet. Also, I used an alias and supplied no information about myself personally to the sign-up process of the message board.
@Koohiisan I used a dummy Gmail address unrelated to my .edu school address to sign up onto the site. I usually do this with most sites to avoid any spam.
When I was using the board, I did have my campus email open in a different tab on my browser. So I’m just confused how someone I gave no personal information to and no legit email address, could figure out my .edu email, when I only use that email for on campus communication. I never use it for any logins or other websites than to communicate with students and professors on campus.
@Darkpassen
Two options come to mind:
1) keylogger on your system recording your keystrokes and sending them out could have caught your email info,
2) someone sniffing while you were attached to an unsecured wireless network could have caught your email info,
Those may be a bit unlikely, but I can’t see how they’d get your email address otherwise. Granted, though, that if either of those situations happened to you you’d have a lot worse things to worry about…