The most notable author making this claim is Dr Brooke Magnanti - better known as the author of the Belle de Jour blog and books - who claims that one of her old email accounts received a message from a Sunday Times journalist with a curious attachment.
Whilst accessing the account from Florida, the attachment, she says, started downloading automatically but came up with a 'failed to download' message.
"My heart sank - my suspicion was that there had been a program attached to the message, some sort of trojan, presumably trying to get information from my computer", she says in her latest blog.
After contacting the website that the old email address had been listed on, the owner of the site told Dr Magnanti that they had been contacted by the Sunday Times and "asked if I was indeed in Florida."
"He told them he didn't know (which was true)" she says.
Dr Magnanti adds that she asked a friend in Australia to open and reply to the email, to throw any chance of the journalist logging an IP address.
Dr Magnanti goes on to say that, since she did not reply to the message from the computer in Florida, "why would the Sunday Times know she had a Florida IP address?"
They did, she explained, get a reply from her account, but it would have had an IP address from Australia.
"In the wake of accusations surrounding not only News of the World but other News International papers as well, it's something to keep in mind. It's not just a phone that can be hacked. Have other routes of invasion even been investigated at all? And it is, to my mind, probably likely to have happened to loads of people", she says.