Engineers and computer scientists at Concordia University say they have cracked the code for
tracing anonymous e-mails.

For the first time, said data-mining expert Benjamin Fung, analysts have used complex,
almost imperceptible human quirks to work out each person’s unique email fingerprint or “writeprint.”

“The people who wrote the e-mail don’t even recognize what they are doing,” Fung said.
“One of the features we break down is vocabulary richness.”

Other telltale evidence can come from common grammatical mistakes, an unconscious extra space between each paragraph or patterns in punctuation.

Combinations are the key. All of the suspects may misspell “consensus.” But not all of them misspell “consensus,” use commas instead of periods and think “none” takes a plural verb.