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One of my college compsci professor didn't know anything about manipulating SMTP headers or manually crafting email messages. Couldn't abuse it too much, but co

One of my college compsci professor didn't know anything about manipulating SMTP headers or manually crafting email messages. Couldn't abuse it too much, but could certainly turn in an assignment 8-12 hours late... because the timestamps would be before the cutoff. Any questions were allayed with "oh, you know email. Strange things happens, delays and all that". We weren't even sending email on a public server, we were just using email on the local compsci server. Checking our messages with pine/alpine. The excuses didn't make any sense... but....

gjvnq 5y ago
As a kid I did manage to send emails in other people's names but I never really used it for anything serious.
rhn_mk1 5y ago
Nitpickingly, while some SMTP (reicpients list) duplicated that in the email message, SMTP doesn't care about timestamps. It's the MIME stamp that can be messed with. Most servers add a "Received" line to the MIME contents with some SMTP info, and you can't fool the timestamp inside that.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
> Any questions were allayed with "oh, you know email. Strange things happens, delays and all that". The funny thing is, on the real internet with SMTP (so, not in your case but commonly), that's actually true; I once worked at a company that sent a massive amount of email to customers with our own postfix clusters, and it turns out things like "MX was down for a few hours" or "customer's email system rate limited us" - or rarely even "our servers are overloaded and trickling mail out" - are real things and sometimes emails do get held up for hours or days.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  dunno the back-story, but I've had some "valid for 5 minutes" password reset emails that would arrive expired (after 6 minutes+). And it didn't seem like the kind of company to do shenanigans, just technical voodoo.
- darnir 5y ago
  Public SMTP server issues reminds of the classic 500 Mile Email: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

gjvnq 5y ago

As a kid I did manage to send emails in other people's names but I never really used it for anything serious.

rhn_mk1 5y ago

Nitpickingly, while some SMTP (reicpients list) duplicated that in the email message, SMTP doesn't care about timestamps. It's the MIME stamp that can be messed with. Most servers add a "Received" line to the MIME contents with some SMTP info, and you can't fool the timestamp inside that.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

> Any questions were allayed with "oh, you know email. Strange things happens, delays and all that". The funny thing is, on the real internet with SMTP (so, not in your case but commonly), that's actually true; I once worked at a company that sent a massive amount of email to customers with our own postfix clusters, and it turns out things like "MX was down for a few hours" or "customer's email system rate limited us" - or rarely even "our servers are overloaded and trickling mail out" - are real things and sometimes emails do get held up for hours or days.

Scoundreller 5y ago
dunno the back-story, but I've had some "valid for 5 minutes" password reset emails that would arrive expired (after 6 minutes+). And it didn't seem like the kind of company to do shenanigans, just technical voodoo.
darnir 5y ago
Public SMTP server issues reminds of the classic 500 Mile Email: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html