how do I find hidden email? and what been looked at'InPrivate'

[sicilianbuttercup]

Hi, I think someone (ds?) has created an extra email account on our main computer and is sucessfully hiding it. Can any techy genius tell me how to find it? I went to our email tool bar in the hope that there may be a clever button to show you what has been deleted from the deleted items bit but all I can find is send/receive and work off line. Apologies if this has been asked before, i'm new to mn.

What email program are you using on your computer? Outlook Express? Or an online service like gmail or msn?

Its outlook express I think I have just made myself a hot mail account as well so have just found out how easy it would be to hide it

It's ment to say what has , not what!!!

I'd say it's much more likely that if there is a "secret" email account it would be an online one rather than one being accessed by Outlook Express. It would be a pain in the bum to get Outlook Express to hide what it's doing but it's a lot easier to hide which websites you're accessing.

Email accounts don't exist on your computer. They exist on the email server (hotmail, gmail, yahoo.... whichever company is hosting it).

There are two ways of accessing the emails on the email server. One is to use an email client, like Outlook Express, which runs on your PC and downloads emails from the server. The other is to use webmail. This means the email client is a website that you log on to so the emails don't ever get downloaded onto your PC.

So... if someone using your PC has created a new email account they could have used webmail so you would have to look at the browser history to see if they have accessed a website like Gmail or Hotmail. Or they could be using Outlook Express to access the mail but are deleting the account details after downloading email (and deleting the emails).

Thanks, That makes sense, it would be easy to log into InPrivate browsing, and then go on to Gmail or Hotmail ect, but how do I find the inprivate browser history and how do I find deleated emails deleated from the deleated email box?

If it's an online email service, you would need the password and login for that as well, which may well have not been saved in the browser history. You would need something along the lines of a keylogger to get hold of that information, assuming they access it again.

The point of private browsing is that the history is not saved. I'm not sure if it's secretly saved somewhere, but I highly doubt it.

Also, what makes you suspect? If there's a reason for your suspicion, that might allow us to get a better handle on how it's been done.

Thanks again, i've googled not so private Inprivate, and it looks like it can be done, however the soultions look so very techy that I'm not sure if I'm up to it. I would like to hear if anyone else done it though.

Without meaning to sound rude, if you don't know the difference between webmail and Outlook express then I don't think you will understand how to interpret the results of recovering all the deleted files from an inprivate session.

Your best bet is simply to put the computer in public where you can see what your son is doing rather than doing battle with your DS who from the sounds of things is more tech savvy than you.

Please don't take that as an insult. I am a very well paid geek and my specialisation is networks and security. My DS(10) still managed to keep a facebook account secret from me for months.

In that context, it's way easier to move the computer to a place where you can see what he's doing rather than get lulled into a false sense of security when in fact your son is merely hiding things better.