"How many other humans have you ever met that actually had their email address hijacked?"
This happened to my wife a couple years ago, and she eventually had to change her email address.
"What does that mean anyway? How does that work?"
"Hijacked" was the term that came to my mind when he described what had happened to his email account. I should have used the term "spoofed", more info here
http://www.mailsbroadcast.com/email....l.spoofing.htm
I got the impression from Ron that this was a recent thing for him, and he wasn't using it as an excuse for the past few years of non-communication.