TexasSwede

Seems like Melanie's husband Chuck now is taking responsibility.

One of the comments further down have an interesting point/explanation:

I do DSL support for a major ISP. I think I can guess how Mr. Kroll came to send the e-mail from his wife’s account….

Many businesses (and quite a few individuals) use e-mail client programs, typically various versions of Outlook and Outlook Express on MSwindows machines or MacMail on Mac OS X machines. If you have multiple e-mail adresses in one of these programs, one of them will be tagged as "default" and, unless changed when you send an e-mail, the default address will be used as the "from" address for any e-mail.

At a guess Mrs. Kroll’s machine was set up this way and Mr. Kroll–in his rage–forgot to change the from address. Understandable, in a stupid sort of way, but poor setup in any case.

On any reasonbly modern machine (WinXP, Vista, Mac OS X, Linux), access can be separated by login account and mail clients can be set differently for each account in order to prevent something like that–at least to extent that the error would be sending e-mail inadvertently from ones own work account, rather than that of someone else.

Perhaps worth to point out is that if you use the Lotus Notes client for your email, you don't have the same problem, even if you have Notes setup to be your default mail client. If Notes is not running, you get a login prompt asking you for password, and you see the name of the user. Of course you don't give your spouse the password to your work mail.

But in most cases I would assume that you don't use Notes as default mail client for mailto links. I have Gmail setup for that, using Gmail Notifier. So to send work mail, I login to the Notes client, and to send mail to addresses found on web pages, I use Gmail.

 The other day, Philip Storry wrote "A lack of training, or a lack of intelligence", about someone sending a death threat to a professor who happens to be an atheist. This person (mkroll, who later was identified as Melanie Kroll) sent the mail from her work address at 1-800-FLOWERS. If you look at the headers provided by Professor Myers, you can see that the address is not spoofed.

I contacted a journalist at IDG that I know from working there, and he did some investigating to see if he would be able to write a story about this. I just got a mail from him, informing me that Melanie was fired yesterday over this mail.

I say as the very funny Ron White: "You just can't fix stupid"...

 Robert McMillan just wrote a story in PC World about a new laptop tracking system, which is free:

Lose your laptop these days and you lose part of your life: You say good-bye to photos, music and personal documents that cannot be replaced, and if it's a work computer, you may be the source of a very public data breach.

But now, researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego, have found a way to give you a shot at getting your life back. On Monday, they plan to launch a new laptop tracking service, called Adeona that is free and private.

Named after the Roman goddess credited with guiding children back to their parents, Adeona uses software that has been under development for the past year.

Sounds interesting! Read the full article for more details.