Mail Loop From Hell (2012)
Another story about inappropriate emails, luckily I wasn&#x27;t the perpetrator here.<p>It was the late 90&#x27;s. Email systems were generally wide open for exploitation. (It was the golden age of Spam)<p>I myself had figured out that it was trivial to send a message and make it look like it came from <i>anyone</i>. Simple:<p><pre><code>  telnet &lt;server&gt; 25
  HELO
  MAIL FROM: &lt;whatever you want&gt;
  RCPT TO: &lt;recipient&gt;
  DATA &lt;body contents&gt;
  QUIT
</code></pre>
I used this a few times to mess with friends, send them messages from God, etc. Good times.<p>Thing is, I wasn&#x27;t the only one who&#x27;d figured this out, and the university had an &quot;All Users&quot; list with only 3 or 4 people whitelisted to send it messages.<p>Someone else knew about the forged FROM scheme, and <i>speculated</i> that the &quot;All Users&quot; list didn&#x27;t do any fancy verification of the &quot;From&quot; address.<p>This speculation was correct. And the University President was one of those 3 or 4 people whose email address was whitelisted.<p>The problem for this student was that they thought to themselves, &quot;No, it couldn&#x27;t be that easy...&quot; And proceeded to send a test message.<p>It was that easy, and their test message sent successfully. The contents were... explosive. First, it cancelled all classes for the day (of course). Had it stopped there, this story might have ended as just an ultimately harmless prank. But it went further.<p>The message went on to describe how the president, with this free time from classes, would make herself available to provide, um, carnal knowledge of a very uncomfortable place at a particular time &amp; location.<p>It didn&#x27;t take long. IP addresses were statically assigned. It was easy to locate the offending computer, which in this case was in a computer lab.<p>So, cross reference login times against that IP address, right? Nope, not necessary: The computer was the one reserved only for the lab assistant on duty. Expulsion was rapid. In an interview with the student newspaper, the student decried, &quot;I didn&#x27;t think it would work!&quot;