apparently someone with an intense hardon for spelling like an illiterate, retarded, monkey has been emailing individuals on this list using my email address (as revealed to CoT by ME the other day....GO wSV!, you genius you) as the 'FROM'.

examination of the headers has so far been an exercise in the exploration of bizarre foreign proxies.

so, let me just repeat:

I have NOT emailed anyone who has not emailed me first.  I have been engaged in desultory email conversations with maybe 5 people (you know who you are) since I began posting to JoS all those years ago.

so, take all unexpected emails from fellow CoTters with a large spoon of salt.
On the whole the safest way to check whether or not they are 'real' is to NOT reply to them within your email client, but to instead return to CoT and email the sender via the email button in CoT...thus ensuring you are contacting the actual owner of that nick.

bah.  seriously.  falsifying your FROM and pretending to be someone else for the purpose of insulting your target is actually a federal crime.  whomever is doing this is playing an interesting game, one they _will_ eventually lose should someone here actually decide to participate.

It wasn't me, I've never emailed anyone here and I had to look up desultory. (it means random or unstructured)

But this federal law thing interests me, what does it say? Is it just that thing - forged header + insults? In the past I've been known to forge headers to play tricks on friends, like they are getting a personal email from David Bowie or whatever.

Just the forged headers thing I think, PE. Part of CAN SPAM, I think, or maybe even something before that.

And to think, when I was little, you couldn't even be prosecuted for hacking into other people's computers.

I'm curious: how many people here can look at message headers (and body, where appropriate) and figure out if it's forged?  I tend to assume that most non-techies can't but that most techies can, ie everyone here should be able to do it.

Define "forged". I used to be pretty good at Usenet post headers, less good at email. In the days when I cared about that stuff.