This NY Times article about professors getting weird emails from students is interesting, but seems to overstate its case a bit. I wondered if the professors might have held back from describing the real horror stories out of a sense of propriety.

Kieran Healy also picks up on something the article missed, which is the weird email addresses students choose to email you from.

One thing it didn’t mention: even though universities give students email addresses, it’s often the case that students won’t use them. Instead they prefer their free hotmail or yahoo or gmail addresses. No problem as such there, except that sometimes the students pick the kind of addresses for themselves that aren’t exactly professional-quality. Frankly it feels a bit odd to correspond with, e.g., missbitchy23 or WildcatBongs about letters of reference or what have you.