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Reminds me of the email cannon we built on Gmail, not exactly on purpose. We needed a full Gmail account to do some testing on our company's email backup system
by damoncali 15y ago
Reminds me of the email cannon we built on Gmail, not exactly on purpose. We needed a full Gmail account to do some testing on our company's email backup system. At the time that meant 8GB of email. And you couldn't just send a bunch of huge attachments, as it had to be like regular email. So we took a gmail account and signed it up for dozens of active linux related email lists (because they were easy to find).
The result was an email account that got an email message every second or so in a variety of languages.
We quickly realized that you could have some fun by forwarding that address to someone else's email account.
Fast forward a few months, and Gmail smartly requires a confirmation before allowing you to forward.
- creamyhorror 15y agoOnce in middle school in the late '90s I created an email loop between two free email accounts that forwarded an extra copy of the email every iteration. It was an experiment out of curiosity and mischief. I don't think the server actually went down when I started the loop (at least, I can't remember if it did) - since the mailbox would have failed up and messages fail to be delivered. I think I was hoping to produce an "email cannon" similar to yours - an email spammer to be directed at whoever I liked.
- joelhaasnoot 15y agoAh yes, the days of computer labs in high school and figuring out that outlook lets you copy and paste emails in the Outbox. Just get a big enough collection and keep copying and pasting. Easy recipe for getting hundreds - thousands of emails.