Alan at the blog Blue Hole is pulling a little prank this morning: He’s sending out weird stories from the Oregonian via the Oregonlive site. But he’s using other people’s email addresses, to prove a point.

In case you’ve never visited Oregonlive.com, I’d suggest you take a look. It’s not just that it’s the most poorly designed newspaper site in the world — there are clones, all run by Advance Internet — it’s an example of almost complete un-usability.

But there is one interesting feature, thanks to the horrible design and coding: you can easily spoof an email address when you send an article to someone else. How do I know this? Someone sent articles to a friend of mine, using my employer-assigned email address that included vulgar messages. Thankfully, my friend contacted me to ask me what the hell I was talking about. But I don’t know who else received messages allegedly written by me, using my email address paid for with your tax dollars. And it’s disturbing to think what else might have been sent and to whom.

So when I contacted Oregonlive.com with my complaint, I got the brush off, despite polite inquiries over the course of several weeks. When I finally got someone on the phone, she admitted she’d been contacting people at Advance using a web form, waiting for their (typically techie and unhelpful) responses. Eventually I got the editor-in-chief, who informs me that I cannot have the IP addresses of the senders of messages using my email address as the return. You read that correctly. Oregonlive.com provides an easy way for you to harass other people and make it look as though someone else is the culprit.

We got a note from “Steve Duin” this morning, which I thought was a little odd. Even stranger, it was a link to this story about elephant pregnancy and birth, with the message “Would you like a mustache ride?”

(Thanks but no thanks, Steve.)