Need help on an email from my "daughter"

[judasmachine]

Take the safe route as this deals with your child. Notify the police, and give Google a call. Normally I'd just say that they ripped the name from something you filled out somewhere, but since it's your 6 year old, I'd take it seriously and overreact.

 

[chambersc]

Originally posted by: HybridSquirrel

Originally posted by: AMDMaddness

Originally posted by: HybridSquirrel

Originally posted by: AMDMaddness
No my daughter doesnt have email and my daughter is in the next room (she is 6) my wife is sleeping in her room tonight.

thts pretty scary for a 6 year old, maybe she had to do one for school? (my nephew started kindergarten this year and they had to make emails) does she use the computer?

No she doesnt have an email nor does she do it at school. It was sent tonight at 12:05am she was in bed at 8pm

ok, honestly what i would do is notify the police, if it is a hacker than can hand it over to the internet fraud dpt of the FBI or something. thats what i would do at least, might lose your pc for a month or so so they can "investigate"

Yeah, I would notify the police. I'd rather be safe than sorry.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Originally posted by: judasmachine
Take the safe route as this deals with your child. Notify the police, and give Google a call. Normally I'd just say that they ripped the name from something you filled out somewhere, but since it's your 6 year old, I'd take it seriously and overreact.

Of course signing up for a Google account using that name, and sending an email like that, is a bit more than what somebody would do who was just fishing for email addresses. They'd have just sent it from some zombie PC or Chinese ISP with a fake email address.

 

[EKKC]

OMG! your daughter from the future invented a machine that can email the past!

 

[Lord Evermore]

Originally posted by: EKKC
OMG! your daughter from the future invented a machine that can email the past!

No, no. Notice it was gmail. GOOGLE invented the machine, so people with gmail accounts in the future can email the past, but only if they use Gmail, with Google's patented technology.

 

[wazzledoozle]

Perhaps a friend/someone you know registered the email who knows your daughter's name, as a prank?

 

[Lord Evermore]

That's a "we're no longer friends, and if you come near me or my family again I'll snap your neck" prank. Although they may have not considered the negative interpretation forced on parents these days.

 

[Savij]

Your daughter put her name in some website along with your email address. That message was sent with today's batch of emails. Mystery solved.

 

[TrevorJ]

Assuming your daughter is NOT the person who sent the email, we can deduce three things:

1. This person knows who your daughter is.
2. This person knows your email address.
3. This person wanted to freak you out.

Can you think of someone who might have a grudge against you, or someone who is capable of playing a sick joke on you?

 

[DanTMWTMP]

everyone can speculate to their heart's extent. Just play it safe, call the police and contact google on the matter.

 

[eits]

it's probably some loser phisher or something

 

[Passions]

Wow totally creeepy, like one of those The Grudge horror movies.

Send a reply and see if you get a response.

 

[tfinch2]

Google is experimenting with your daughter by implanting an e-mail system in her brain.

Respond back to the e-mail, then get really freaked out when she wakes up and says "Hey daddy I got your e-mail last night"

 

[munisgtm]

Originally posted by: thebigdude
One of your friends pulling a very strange prank?

 

[eakers]

Is is possible you gave her name in a thread here or on another forum and then someone used that information along with your profile to send you a creepy email? Internet people do weird stuff like that sometimes, just because they can.

 

[funboy6942]

I say your wife is laughing her ass off in the room with your daughter right now

OH she got you go old boy!

 

[AMDMaddness]

I got a reply to my email :Q

this is what it said:

i am so sorry i thought u were me dad!!!!!!!!!!!


Now I am hoping this is just some weird coincidence and she happens to have the exact name of my daughter and emailed me on accident. It?s beyond weird the email is sent from the same address ip address as before.

Originally posted by: funboy42
I say your wife is laughing her ass off in the room with your daughter right now

OH she got you go old boy!

I thought it was a prank from my wife but she was more freaked out than I was. It wasnt her.

 

[Zap]

Check to see how many other people in the USA has the same name.

There are 217 people in the USA with the same name as me.

 

[Kur]

Crazy

 

[AMDMaddness]

Originally posted by: Zap
Check to see how many other people in the USA has the same name.

There are 217 people in the USA with the same name as me.

Only 21 people for me and 12 for my daughter.

 

[ghostman]

Actually, the first thing that came to my mind was perhaps a family member's (or family friend's) teenage child was playing a prank. If you converse with a family member (a sibling, cousins, etc.), there's a very good chance that family member's child knows your email address by now too. And this other child might not realize how scary that prank can be on a parent.

 

[ttown]

Your tracert to 10.114.179.10 won't work because the 10.whatever is one of the non-routable network addresses.

Those IP addresses in the "received by...." portions of the email header are internal to google.
Since the email was FROM gmail, TO gmail -- you won't be able to find anything on your own. Those are just google-server#1 fowarding stuff to google-server#2.

You could try contacting google with your concerns and tell them the message-id.
From that, they should be able to tell what internet IP logged in to create that message.
But you'd probably have to do it quickly in case google doesn't keep the logs around.

It may also be considered private information that they won't divulge without a subpoena, which may be hard to get since the message wasn't threatening -- just creepy as a dad.

I'd be creeped out too.

edit: Whoops... Lord Evermore already said the same thing as me.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Oh I'm sure Google keeps those logs for a long long long time, like most companies who aren't deliberately trying to "protect your privacy and anonymity". In fact isn't there a law now about it?

If nothing else, it's fodder for future types of data mining, ad focusing, search engine tweaks, etc.

AMDMaddness: It's not strange it was the same IP address. If I send an email through my ISP, it'll almost always be the same IP address because they don't change them very often (dynamically assigned addresses, but they usually just renew with the same one). Only a dial-up user is likely to have a different IP each time they connect. Also, remember that the email is NOT being sent from that person's own computer, as it would be with an email client like Outlook. It is being sent from Google's own webmail server, the "client" is running on that machine, so the originating IP will always be that server's IP (or the IP of a local server if they use different ones for each region).

Is your gmail username just your last name? Even if somebody else had the same name as your daughter, why would they just happen to send an email to your email address thinking it was her father?

I think replying to the message was the very last thing you should have done. It may have turned out well this time (although it's still not definite that it has), it could have just fed whatever creep was doing it and prompted further actions.

 

[AMDMaddness]

Originally posted by: Lord Evermore
Oh I'm sure Google keeps those logs for a long long long time, like most companies who aren't deliberately trying to "protect your privacy and anonymity". In fact isn't there a law now about it?

If nothing else, it's fodder for future types of data mining, ad focusing, search engine tweaks, etc.

AMDMaddness: It's not strange it was the same IP address. If I send an email through my ISP, it'll almost always be the same IP address because they don't change them very often (dynamically assigned addresses, but they usually just renew with the same one). Only a dial-up user is likely to have a different IP each time they connect. Also, remember that the email is NOT being sent from that person's own computer, as it would be with an email client like Outlook. It is being sent from Google's own webmail server, the "client" is running on that machine, so the originating IP will always be that server's IP (or the IP of a local server if they use different ones for each region).

Is your gmail username just your last name? Even if somebody else had the same name as your daughter, why would they just happen to send an email to your email address thinking it was her father?

I think replying to the message was the very last thing you should have done. It may have turned out well this time (although it's still not definite that it has), it could have just fed whatever creep was doing it and prompted further actions.

My reply was a simple who is this? I normaly wouldnt have responded but my wife pushed me and well it turned out ok. This whole thing turned out very weird.

 

[AreaCode707]

Google your name and your daughter's name and see if you can identify other individuals out there that share your names. It's possible you could validate whether this is a legitimate mistake, as small as the chance may be.