The Wyvern Street Irregulars

The account Debbie used to compose (and depending upon target address, encrypt) the emails was one of her accounts at a domain known by various assortments of people to be associated with Wyvern Steet. More importantly, the email server that sent the email was right there in Wyvern Street. It is often trivially easy to write anyone's address, at any domain, into the from-address field of an email message. Accordingly, most people - or machines - that are 'in the know' are not likely to raise alarums over the contents of the sender field of an email. It would be too easy for spoofers to set off the alarms at whim, from almost anywhere on the internet.

Spoofing the actual sending server is significantly more difficult for most people. Thus most folk who would want to know right away whenever they received an email sent from Wyvern Street had their alarm triggers look at the sending server rather than the purported from-address.

Debbie knew this, of course. She had deliberately logged in to an account that she knew would send out the email directly from a server actually physically located at Wyvern Street. Among other things that she knew this would do was to bump the email to somewhere near the top of Susan's email priority queue at the covenstead. Susan might even have some volume of audible alarm set based on how much she wanted or did not want to be woken up by the arrival of such an email. Actually there even existed methods by which Debbie could set off the smoke or fire or burglar alarms of the covenstead via email. But this matter was merely urgent, not an emergency.

She had sent copies to various other addresses in addition to Susan's normal account at the covenstead, so as it happened Susan was not the first to know. Various people who happened to be awake when the email was sent, or who had set their alarm on emails originating from Wyvern Street loud enough to wake them up, read it before Susan did. Debbie had even received a few instant automatic responses from people who had set up pre-written congratulations triggered by receiving announcements of such events. A few people even had sophisticated enough calendars, appointment books, diaries or logs that the announced event was automatically pasted into their daily itinerary. So all in all with just a few minutes work Debbie had alerted quite a large and widely dispersed community. By dawn the local taxi company commonly designated as Wyvern Street's snailmail-and-deliveries drop-point had begun receiving flowers, gifts, and other deliveries.