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@sky.org> To: <rchains@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