Email Safety
If you are using an email program such as Outlook and your abuser has access to your computer, he or she will easily be able to read your email.
Step 1: Delete sensitive emails that you send and receive.
Step 2: After you have deleted a message, go to the Deleted Mail folder in Outlook, highlight the message and delete it again. (Be aware that the message may still reside somewhere on your computer. A trained technician may be able to recover it.)
If you are worried about the privacy of your email on your home computer, you might want to set up a free email account for yourself on the web. If you set up an account with Hotmail or Yahoo, for example, your email messages will be stored on the Hotmail or Yahoo server instead of your own computer.
To protect your access to your email account, choose a password that you will be able to remember, but that will be hard for someone else to guess. Do not write down the password; you could write down a clue for yourself to help you remember the password.
What about newsgroups, forums and
listservs?
Do I need to be concerned about privacy issues?
Messages you post to a public newsgroup or forum are available for anyone to view, copy, and store. Also, your name, email address, and information about your service provider are usually available as part of the message.
Most public postings made on the internet are archived in searchable files. That means that your public messages can be accessed by anyone at anytime.
Online newsletters and listserves are sent to a mailing list of subscribers. If you want to privately reply to someone who has posted a message in an online newsletter or listserv, be sure you address it with that person's address, not to the newsletter address. Otherwise, you might find that your message has been sent to everyone on the mailing list.
What about Instant Messaging?
Instant messaging (sometimes called IM) is the ability to easily see whether a friend is connected to the Internet and, if they are, to exchange messages with them. Generally it is good practice not to transmit sensitive and confidential information through Instant Messengers, since IM could be intercepted and read.If you use instant messaging and your abuser has access to your computer, be aware of and make use of the privacy features of the program you are using. MSN messenger, ICQ, AOL each have slightly different privacy protection features.
Make sure you DO NOT have your computer set to automatically keep a history of your messages if you are concerned about your abuser reading them.
For example, if you are using MSN messenger, select Options and then Messages; unclick the checkbox for message history.
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