If "the man" comes down on the operation and knows about the hotmail account, they will almost certainly subpoena hotmail for all of his/her e-mails, and Hotmail will cooperate. I think it's also a safe bet to assume that even after (s)he deletes it, that e-mail might still exist on a file system somewhere for some amount of time, in the form of a deleted-mail holding area, or on tape, or on a redundant server, or something. Worse yet, the logs of that message will probable exist much longer than the message itself would, which leads to other avenues of recovery. Was the message queued on disk somewhere before it was sent? Was it sent from a financial company that is required by the SEC to archive all their e-mails? Does the sender have a copy in their sent-mail (is that sent-mail an IMAP folder on the ISP's servers, being backed up regularly?) If she viewed the message through hotmail's web interface, do the contents exist in her browser cache? Did she go through a proxy server which may have cached the message? Adam Maloney Systems Administrator Sihope Communications On Sat, 22 May 2004, johnnyfulcrum wrote: > > Hi- > > I have a friend of a friend that needs to make sure an email is removed > and cannot be recovered from his/her harddrive. > > I said no problem - I can physically destroy the HD or, if you want to use > it again I can DBAN the HD and reinstall, and if you don't want to go that > route, we can find software to rewrite over (an over) the empty blocks etc > etc... (any other ideas here?). > > (S)He then asked about the server that had the email - in this case it was > hotmail.com. I said I hadn't a clue about how to make sure that when > (S)he "trashed" the email on hotmail - that it really "went away". I also > had no clue if the "LAW" could get their hands on the email via > hotmail.com even if we cleared the local computer. > > Can anyone on the list help me address these concerns? > > thanks > John(nnyF) > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org > Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list