Okay, time for my story: About two decades ago, while going through new-employee orientation at a university, I sent some e-mail from a computer lab. As part o

Okay, time for my story: About two decades ago, while going through new-employee orientation at a university, I sent some e-mail from a computer lab. As part of this, I entered my e-mail address as the reply-to address. At that moment, there was some kind of misconfiguration: the directory on the university-wide server where global defaults were stored happened to be writeable. A couple of weeks later, when all the students showed up, my e-mail address was the default reply-to address on the standard e-mail client in all university computer labs. And because the configuration problem had been fixed -- the directory was no longer writeable -- my address remained the default address. It took me a while to figure out what had happened. For several days, all I knew was that suddenly I was subscribed to every mailing list in the universe. When I did figure it out, I told the IT people, and they fixed it. But then -- I'm not making this up! -- there was some kind of crash, they had to restore from a backup, and it happened all over again. There was no serious negative impact from this episode; I just got tons of wacky e-mails for a while. Perhaps things might be different if something similar were to happen today.