Was Birnbaum's sending of the accidental e-mail about Hood really an accident?

This is the question some have posed to me. I considered this possibility immediately after I heard of the e-mail about Jim Hood, which is discussed in this post from two days ago. I soon rejected this as a likely possibility for reasons I will state below, and I didn't think it worth bringing up until I received several messages from regular readers whom I would place in the category of canaries in the rumor coal mine -- they reliably hear of almost all the key rumors and are accurate reflections of the zeitgeist (I mean this in a complimentary way -- if they were nutjobs I would pay no attention to what they say).The indications are therefore that a considerable traffic exists in the belief that the e-mail was not an accident, but rather a sort of dead fish mailed to Hood (&q