I was a postmaster too in the early years of the 90's. Coincidentally even at a university. I remember one day when I arrived at work to find a number of bounces from what appeared the same person.
In those days you could see all the headers easily and make out for whom the message was. Occasionally you would see part of the body (remember 80x25).
The first couple of messages where rather normal. What you would expect. Of course the sender did get the bounces too and he seemed to grasp what was happening. That a postmaster would be seeing his message. He tried different address to try to find the right one.
When he didn't find the right one he probably decided to have some fun with the postmaster. After a while the messages started to contain questionable information (not pictures or movies, remember the days without attachments). Probably trying to find out how easily the postmaster as offended or would take actions.
Those moments made the day.
We did have a procedure in place to forward the real message and not the bounce. It consisted of some header hacking and it worked well enough to make the intended recipient reply to the original sender instead of the postmaster.
I was a postmaster too in the early years of the 90's. Coincidentally even at a university. I remember one day when I arrived at work to find a number of bounces from what appeared the same person.
In those days you could see all the headers easily and make out for whom the message was. Occasionally you would see part of the body (remember 80x25).
The first couple of messages where rather normal. What you would expect. Of course the sender did get the bounces too and he seemed to grasp what was happening. That a postmaster would be seeing his message. He tried different address to try to find the right one.
When he didn't find the right one he probably decided to have some fun with the postmaster. After a while the messages started to contain questionable information (not pictures or movies, remember the days without attachments). Probably trying to find out how easily the postmaster as offended or would take actions.
Those moments made the day.
We did have a procedure in place to forward the real message and not the bounce. It consisted of some header hacking and it worked well enough to make the intended recipient reply to the original sender instead of the postmaster.
Peter Peters, Aug 12 2011 on 1500wordmtu.com