Fascinating logic problem; anyone have ideas?

I got this email yesterday:

Can i be removed from this list?

-----Original Message-----

From: Daniel Mittleman danny@cdm.depaul.edu
Sent: Mon, 6 Apr 2009 17:56:56 –0505
To: 63088164XX@txt.att.net
Subject: 440 Team Selection Survey
>We have two surveys for you to fill out. The first one
>http://virtual.dmittleman.com/survey/index.php?sid=81397
>Has three questions and will be used to place you on a team

And followed up to find out it is not a student in the class.  It is a random person in the 630 area code who is getting our class emails.  What to do?

After some email back and forth, I wrote this message to my correspondent today:

OK, I have a better idea what is going on now, but so far have not been able to track down which student this is.

My best guess is that there is a DePaul student who has done one of two things:

1. Either he registered your address as his own with DePaul university (due to Federal Law, I don't have open access to see this information), or 2. Separate from the university, he set up a forwarding system from his main email account to his texting account and put your number in by mistake. (I am guessing this is it as it is unlikely a student would give the university a texting address as his primary address.)

In either case, I don't have any way to get at the data to figure out who it is AND if I send email to all my students asking them to check out their own accounts, the particular student in question will not receive the email, you will.

I will mention it to the students in class next Saturday (today's class was cancelled due to the Easter holiday), but half of my students are distance learning students and the primary means of contact with them is email (which is going to you and not the student in question).

So I sympathize with your plight; but the error is neither mine nor  DePaul University's. I'll do the best I can to find the student and get it fixed. But you may receive a few more emails in the interim.

If this is not satisfactory to you, I am happy to provide you with contact info for higher ups at DePaul. But as it seems to be a problem external to DePaul, it is not likely they can do very much either.

Do any of you have any suggestions what to do?  Isn’t this a fascinating logic dilemma with email forwarding?  You can be the receiver of someone’s forwarded email and have absolutely no way to inform them of the problem.

Comments

[Rob Jawor]

Danny,

With this problem I would try and go back to the basics. I'd get a list of all the email address in your distribution list and send out an email to each one separately with a number corresponding to a particular email address.

So, I would get an email from you with the #1, another classmate would get #2, etc.

When the external person receives the number, you'll at least have a starting point in which to work with.

I agree that it is probably a forwarding error by a student which can be corrected once the person who setup the forward is figured out.

[Farruq Ahmed]

Dear Professor,

I would suggest sending out an e-mail to all your students, asking them to reply back to that e-mail. If there is a person in the list whose e-mails are being forwarded to the external address (the phone number person) then definitely that person will not receive your e-mail and hence he won’t be replying back to you. You can then compare the replies with the list of e-mails that you have in your distribution list. There should be one missing e-mail and that should be the one. I believe this is a time consuming procedure but would surely help to find out about the right person.

[Peter Zucker]

Dear Professor,

I find above suggestions very useful, and have to add only a minor idea to the whole problem. Since you know the email addresses and the name of all students, it might be possible that you can narrow down your search to students who did not fill out the survey, and therefore, it might be one of the students who are left over for being added to a group. I don't know how many students did not reply to your survey, but I think these should only be a few.

[Danny]

Peter,

Possibly, but I also mentioned the survey on the class video, in course announcements, and in my PowerPoint show. So it is possible the bad address person filled it out anyway.

[Sean T]

Professor,

I'm not sure what e-mail client you're using, but if you can look at the full 'message header' it should tell you detailed information about the entire 'path' the e-mail took to get to him. You actually may have to see the original e-mail that the random person received in order to find the true source. It will tell you what 'forwarding' paths it took as well.

[Ayesha Boyd]

I find that very interesting that the user is in the same email group, but is not taking the class. Perhaps that person that is listed in the orginally email goes by this name.

[Tariq Vora]

I would post an annoucment on COL, or a homework assignment. The student will look at the homework assignment and ask for personal information, phone number, address, instant message etc.