My e-mail address is being faked---causing problems for my class. Help please!

[Popinjay]

Okay, here is the situation.  I have a one year instructorship
position as a philosophy teacher at a college.  Somebody, presumably a
student of mine, sent out a fake e-mail to everybody in the class,
except me, saying that class was canceled last Wednesday (the Wed
before fall break).  The sender address was somehow faked, and so it
looks as if it came from me.


I had a student forward a copy of the email to me, but it didn't
provide me with any clues.


I have a few questions regarding this:


#1: Is there any way I can trace this back to a real e-mail address from the copy forwarded to me?  This would be the best option.


#2: Is there any way to prevent this from happening in the future?


I would appreciate any help, since this could get out of hand very quickly. 


Popinjay

[Deerpark]

Unfortunately, it is trivially easy to fake the address listed as the sender in an email.

Tracing the message back to the email account used to send it will be hard. But you can get a lot of useful information from what is known as the header in an email. The header will list what IP and domain the mail was sent from. This could possibly lead you back to the culprit.
How to view the header varies between email clients so its a bit hard to give specific instructions on how to do this. Furthermore you will need to examine the header on the original email since the header will be different on one forwarded to you.
So if you can get a student to show you the original email I suggest you Google the name of his/hers email client and "view header". E.g. "Outlook Express view header" this should provide you with the info needed to access it.

Here is some reading on headers.
http://www.stopspam.org/email/headers.html

Furthermore I'd be happy to to take a look at the header for you if you wish. Contact me via PM to arrange this.

Unfortunately blocking someone from faking your address isn't currently possible. But,
depending on where you live, impersonating you via email might be a crime. So if you suggest to your students that the matter will be turned over to the police, it might be enough to discourage anyone from doing it again.