Thank you for the “heads up”, Eldra.

And you are correct; that stinks that someone would do that.

Gail Van Luvanee

I just wanted to tell you that this doesn’t
necessarily mean your e-mail account has been
compromised.

I learned about this situation the hard way.

Here is a quick story for you.

When I was in college, I ran for A.S. President.

One day, after endorsement interviews, I received an
email which said it was from “Ted Cleary” — a name
which I recognized as the editor from the Daily Nexus
(the college newspaper).

The letter read something like this:

“We enjoyed meeting with you — and were going to
endorse you for student body president, until
yesterday when we received a call at 3:00 a.m. from an
anonymous source. The anonymous source informed us as
to certain things about you which we were unaware. We
therefore felt it was our duty to endorse another
candidate, one more representative of the students.
One who values diversity for diversity’s sake, and not
just as a means to earn votes.”

When I received this e-mail, I was livid. That the
newspaper would take the word of an anonymous caller!!
And so I spent the next -three hours- writing a
rebuttal letter for publication in the Nexus.

As it turns out, it was all a practical joke. My
roommates were actually the ones who wrote that email
and put Ted’s name and Ted’s email address in the
sender field of the e-mail header. Apparently, there
is software which can do this for any email pretty
easily. Any person can make an e-mail seem like it is
coming from President Bush, The Pope, etc. This is
called e-mail spoofing.

Therefore — it may be the case that your e-mail
account is perfectly secure. Here is a good test.
Check your “Sent” folder (if you have one). If you
don’t see any spam messages actually being sent out to
anyone in this folder — it is probably just spoofing;
and not someone who actually hacked into your e-mail
account (i.e. someone who got your password).

Hope this helps.

-Patrick