[ale] Re: 115.00 fine for bouncing email to critter at wizvax.net

[Eric Z. Ayers]

 > -------------------------------------------------------------------------
 > 
 > On Sun, 7 Nov 1999, Eric Z. Ayers wrote:
 > 
 > > Dear critter at wizvax.net, 
 > > 
 > > If this email to you bounces, a fine of 115.00
 > > will be imposed on you by the ale at ale.org mailing list.
 > > 
 > > Your fine will be rescinded if you can convince your boss to to give Linux 
 > > a test drive as your mail server for 30 days!
 > > 
 > > Sincerely,
 > > Eric.
 > > a.k.a. The Bounce Police
 > > 
 > 

Boy, this was a lot more fun that I thought it would be!  Obviously,
if you recieved one of these messages, you would not besubject to a fine,
because your email didn't bounce.  Also, I didn't mention a currency
to pay said fine.  I just said there would be $id.00 of them.
However, if you feel guilty, please forward me your dollars, deutch
marks, pounds... 

This email I sent was just a script to go through every email in the
list and send it a message w/ a unique subject.  I got several bounces
back, but apparently not all of the bounces are sent back to the
sender of the message (Greg probably gets them, or the mailer does
something smart.)   

And if you think THAT wasn't a funny way to sysadmin, we ripped out an 
old server at our office this weekend and replaced it with a Linux box 
and didn't even bother to tell anyone until Monday morning!  We had
a number of problems - most of them legitimate complaints from stuff
we had missed ("Why does my home directory only contain files from
1996 and earlier!?!?"), but to lighten up our day, a funny one was
from the person using netscape who complained that  something must be
wrong with her email because it was sending email too fast - usually
her mail agent hung for 5-10 seconds after sending a message, and now
it just exited right away after sending a message, so she figured it
must be broken.  

-Eric.

P.S. I found the bad email address, #59 on the list.  I think there
are over 400 people on the list: once I found the bad address I
stopped the script, so only a few lucky people recieved this gem
personalized to them.