
Originally Posted by
T-Biggs
I pulled this from another board and thought it might ease some minds:
Of particular concern to some officials are offshore providers of free
e-mail services such as Hushmail,[Footnote 9] based in Ireland, and
Operamail, based in the Netherlands. Officials at one agency told us
that they believe it is too risky to approach these providers with
requests for voluntary cooperation because they can ignore
nondisclosure requests with impunity, and may intentionally or
unintentionally tip off the subjects of investigations.
Internet drug crime investigations are further complicated by service
providers who strip e-mail messages of information about their point of
origin. E-mail generally contains "header" information identifying
various Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, including "routing" and
"originating" IP addresses. IP addresses may prove useful in
determining the identity of the user of a particular e-mail account.
However, in some cases, investigators find that some service providers
automatically eliminate origination and routing IP addresses from e-
mail sent through their services. Hushmail, for example, strips
origination IP addresses and substitutes the IP Address of Hushmail's
own computers on its customers' communications. The result, for
example, is that when a steroids dealer in Florida sends an e-mail to a
customer in Virginia, the e-mail that arrives in Virginia has
Hushmail's originating IP Address in Ireland rather than the actual IP
originating address of the dealer.