Email Security Issues

I am certain someone is hacking and reading my MSN personal email account. Apparently this isn't too difficult to do. This hostile, obsessive person, for example, knows my travel plans when the only possible way to know that is through my email messages.

I suspect that this person may have disabled the email button on my website, so that I do not receive incoming email from the web site, by recording the username and password from incoming email and going to the hosted control panel, opening it and messing around. I'm still looking into that with the webmaster.

What, if anything other than changing my password - which I do - can I do to protect my email; are there reliable programs that can trace the hack into your email back to the source? I run Zone Alarm Pro, which offers some email protection - don't really know what or how.

Does it help if directly after you send or receive a sensitive message, you delete it immediately?

Thanks for your assistance.

Well,

How are you sending and recieving your email? Are you using a web based email client by opening a webpage in your browser, or are you using Outlook Express, or Netscape Communicator or something else to download it?

The way you get to your mail impacts the answer to some of your questions.

As far as tracking them, that kind of depends on that answer as well. If someone is accessing your computer, it should be possible to set up logging to get enough info to start the trace. If they are accessing your email via a webpage at msn, then msn should have logs of when and where someone connected to your account from. Good luck getting access to them though, unless you can get a court order.

As for recieving the username and password from your webmaster via email, well, you should have immediatly changed the management password, as soon as you got it. If you did change it and they can still get in, well, you and your webmaster have bigger problems to deal with than someone reading your email.

If you really want to have mail that is secure, you need to encrypt it. you can use PGP to do this, you can get more information on getting and using pgp at these links....

http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html
http://www.openpgp.org/resources/downloads.shtml
http://www.pgp.com