[Air-l] distracting puzzlement

[Rebecca C. Hains]

Dr. Ess,

I suspect that the answer is quite simple.  On most sites, emailing a
greeting card or news article to another party requires the sender to enter
his or her name and email address.  However, the programs behind these
systems don't actually check whether the sender's account is valid.  That
makes it easy to send messages that look like they're coming from any
address, real or fake.

To verify that this is what happened to you and your student, I just sent
myself an e-card from a non-existing email address via Hallmark. It worked
like a charm (see below).  So, the student is probably neither socially
disfunctional nor a computer wiz -- he or she probably just wanted to play a
practical joke on a classmate, and has a good sense of humor, but also has
exceptionally poor judgement.  (Ie., impersonating a faculty member in an
email is much less funny than impersonating, say, God, who would be much
less likely to get in trouble for emailing students)

I guess that my biggest concern for you is, what if a student picks up on
this idea and tries to set you or another faculty member up?  Ie., it would
be pretty easy to send a racy or otherwise inappropriate e-card and make it
look like it's coming from a legit university email address, which could
really offend a student and get the "sender" in serious trouble.  While I
doubt it would come to that, it might be worth notifying your higher-ups of
this situation, just in case there is any malice behind this.

Best regards,

    Rebecca Hains
    Instructor of English
    Emmanuel College, Boston

----- Original Message -----
From: <Goddess at sky.org>
To: <rchains at attbi.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2002 10:46 AM
Subject: A Hallmark E-Card from A Deity


> Greetings!
>
> We wanted to let you know that A Deity created a Hallmark.com e-card for
you.  To see your card, click the link below, or copy and paste this link
into your Web browser's address line:
>
http://ecardview.hallmark.com/hmk/Website/greeting.jsp?id=EG4106-250387-1889
406