Everyone experiences this at some point. I guess it was our turn.

We had our first incident today with Madison receiving disgusting email. I knew it was going to happen eventually. Fortunately, she was perfectly calm about it.

Her writing partner friend is a nice 13-year-old homeschooled girl who has a 12-year-old brother who is also a friend of my girls. Both of mine take several classes with both of them.

Madison and Regan, the girl, have been working very hard on a writing project and have been phoning and emailing each other back and forth several times each day. Regan's brother, though a nice enough little guy, is on the ACTIVE end of the ADD scale...even *I* am happy when he has taken sufficient medication; I can barely keep up with him, otherwise. He's been somewhat disruptive of the girls' trying to work together, in that just-turned-12-year-old-boy kind of energetic way.

This afternoon, when I was not home, Madison began receiving filthy-languaged emails from Regan's account. She had never seen some of these words before..."f***face" being among them, to give you a sense of what was being sent. She was appalled, but not particularly excited about it. She really hates foul language and NEVER uses it, and knew that Regan could not have meant to have sent it.

David was livid. He had that "my-lovely-innocent-baby-has-been-harmed-so-someone-should-die" look on his face. They had known it couldn't be Regan, so they thought it might be her brother. David had never met the family, so it was natural for him to jump to that conclusion. But as soon as I came home and read the emails, I knew it couldn't be the boy... TOTALLY not his style, and if he wanted to offend anyone, he would be a lot more creative than that, he has a very active mind. And I didn't think even he would know those words. Plus, it wasn't addressed TO anyone, not Madison or anyone. My conclusion is that it had to have been hacked, so I called the family and left a message to that effect.

They looked into it and came to their own easy conclusion: Regan had been emailing Madison from the YMCA and remembered she had left the account open by mistake. Some idiot teenager then got his jollies by emailing that stuff to the one person on Regan's email address book.

The kids' dad told me that they have a program on the kids' computer which automatically emails everything they type over to an archive. He checked it to be absolutely certain before they called me, but the computer hadn't even been on this afternoon.

David still wanted to put the perp through the wall, but we were both quite relieved that the problem seems to be over, and that it wasn't what David and Madison had feared it might be.