Case closed?

Ryan here… Bill has been getting a lot of accusations (rightfully so!) as a result of his enthusiasm displayed in his most recent blog posts. I’ll now be adding events to the blog for what I hope to be closure to this little prank.

Today, my mom got a new email from “C”. She immediately IM’d me the details. I’m going to apologize upfront… this post gets kinda technical, but it’s important as it validates my findings.

Every email contains something called headers which basically logs where an email originates from. Knowing this, I decided to sniff around this new “C” email for the headers. My mom was kind enough to send me her username and password.

I logged into her account and checked out the email headers:

There is a line in the headers that reads: X-AOL-IP: 68.255.108.3
Using this website: http://www.ip2location.com/, I entered in the address. This was the result:

So, this email was sent by someone in CHICAGO that uses AT&T DSL. Sounded like Bill to me. How could I confirm this? I know, remote desktop… Bill uses it. After I entered in his IP in my remote desktop client… this is what I saw:

TOTALLY BUSTED! I immediately IM’d Bill telling him that he was caught. He denied it. I even told him that I would keep the prank going if he would just let me in on it. He STILL denied it. He then told me that Micah was at his apartment the night the email was sent. He said Micah sent it!

As I told Micah of the most recent discovery, I remembered that Micah had received an email from “C” earlier. I told him to forward me the headers immediately. He did.

This older email revealed the following ip: 68.255.108.248
Again, this verified it as being Bill’s computer (AT&T DSL, located in CHICAGO).

How could Bill deny this now? Surprisingly, he did! His first defense is that these headers that I posted are plain text and could have been easily been doctored. I promise… I have not changed anything. I invite him (or anyone) to check out the headers themselves. I’m sure my mom would be willing to pull up the email for anyone.

Since he hasn’t admitted it … I decided to send an email to expose this prank once and for all. After all, some people (right Amy?) were actually starting to believe.

This is the email thread. (click for larger size)

So, as far as I’m concerned, we have our prankster...

..the wolf if you WILL. Let’s burn him!