[HelpINeedHelp]

Okay so I go to this college in NY
Monroe Community College

And I have a student email. Our password starts as our birthdays and I never went on it thus never changed my password.

Someone went onto my email and sent a threatening email to an adviser and because my name was stamped to it, I got blamed for it.

I went and looked in my email address and everything was deleted completely. Every folder was empty.

I don't know what to do, but I can't go back to school until I find who did it or just say I did it.

I was wondering if it was possible to get that information back like at least an IP address from where the email was sent from because I know it wasn't from my house. At this point I'm desperate to find any help. It would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for reading and I hope you can find an answer for me because I am truly clueless as what to do next.

Later...

[ISneezeFunny]

I feel that if you contact the school authorities and explain your situation, they should be able to conduct an investigation into this. The IP address could be found on the e-mail that's been sent to the advisor's inbox.

[jstrike]

If the email was sent from your account there's not much you can do other than to plead your case with school officials. The IP address of the computer it was sent from is typically not contained in the email header. This is a very serious issue and if it was sent through school mail servers they'll be able to tell from the email header what mail server it went through and they be able to go back and check the logs, assuming they keep them.

What I would do is turn around and make them prove that the email was sent by you. They can't... just because it was sent from your account does not mean that you sent it. (They obviously don't see it that way however) Using a birthdate as a password constitutes a security risk... period. In my opinion they used very poor judgement in the way they assign passwords. Do you have a myspace/facebook/etc... page that has your birthday on it? That information is easy to get these days.

Has the school contacted the police? If not, you might want to as you might be able to argue that you are a victim of identity theft... not sure how much luck you'll have with that approach but who knows.

[m0j0]

Do not accept blame for this if you didn't send it. You said you never used the account, which is why you never updated the password. The network admin should be able to pull logs of when the account was actually logged on. If this shows very little activity, that would go a long way to proving your innocence. Who logs into their email account two or three times, just to send a threatening message. Of course, whoever sent the message could have logged into your account many many times. As jstrike said, use of a birthdate as a password is an incredible security risk. A security policy should be in place which forces a user to change this to something more secure. Good luck.

[ScottGem]

First, I think jstrike made a typo. The IP of the PC that sent the mail is certainly included in the header, unless it was spoofed. But the other advice of contacting the school's IT people is very good. They will have logs and should be able to tell how often your account was used, when the password was changed (if it was) and where the log in was from. They maight not be albe to present definitive proof that you didn't send the mai, but they may produce enough to convince the school authorities or at least give you the benefit of the doubt.

[michealb]

Agree about contacting the school IT staff. Depending on how good the person was that sent the email, he might not have even needed your account information. It's not that hard to set up your own SMTP server on a laptop and go to StarBucks and send an email out as who ever you want to be that day. For such a serious issue they really should have more evidence than just its your account in the "from" section. My guess is that you will have have to escalate the issue to what ever process for appeals your school has.

[jstrike]

First, I think jstrike made a typo. The IP of the PC that sent the mail is certainly included inthe header, unless it was spoofed.

I initially thought IP was in the header and then I looked through a few email headers before I made a comment and never saw anything other than my mail server name. (I email stuff from home to work all the time) I just looked through another one right now and noticed my computer name in there. So you're right, it is in there.

Time to take my foot out of my mouth. ;)