“Aren’t emails really easy to trace and impossible to delete?”
Well, yes and no. If you wanted to send an anomous email you could go to almost any library, sign on to their public computers and set up an email account. Send the email and then never use the account again.
I’m sure there are other ways to do it but that one springs to mind. I’m not sure whether email accounts carry any information like your IP address.
Emails can be traced down to the computer that sent them. Yes it also carries the IP address. From an in-depth search you can figure out which routers it went through to get to its location.
In short yes it can be back traced to a sender. Even if from a public library, there are probably surveillance cameras.
“Well, yes and no. If you wanted to send an anomous email you could go to almost any library, sign on to their public computers and set up an email account. Send the email and then never use the account again.”
The video system at the library has you using that computer. So does the ISP have the logs.
If I recall...it depends on the email receiving server. The SMTP protocol (for sending an email) can easily spoof the “sender” (sent from) with any email address provided, it is up to the receiving server to check the IP address and respective domain name to see if it is actually coming from the claimed domain (e.g. @something.com, does the IP match?). The problem is that, historically at least, this check isn’t done. You can easily spoof the sender email address. Years ago, I wrote a program to send an email via the SMTP protocol and used a fake “sent from” email address, it appeared in my receiving in-box no problem.
Digitally signed emails are key in avoiding this.