alt Hacker NewsI worked at a biotech startup about 20 years ago.
- Two of the VPs at the company were named Jim Collinsworth and Peter Sachs (not their real names).
- For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.
- So, I merged the two VP names and I sent an email blast to the entire company from "Peter Collinsworth" (just swapping first and last names).
- "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of "In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x> is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All laboratory generated results will be reported using the following units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight ...." etc. etc. etc.
- Well, Jim Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even he thought that the email had been sent under his own name.
- So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did NOT send this. I don't know what this is about."
- Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke.
- Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was really funny. Don't EVER do it again."
Replies
Seems like a memorable way of showing them that the email system could be configured better.
> For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.
The glorious days of open relays, back when spam was in its infancy. Today it's mostly done on a whitelist basis to let tools like JIRA or Gitlab send notifications under the name of users themselves instead of some noreply address.
For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.
I know of several fortune 100 companies that still allow this due to the way they set up email protection with o365 and Proofpoint, ironically. not naming them. I've done similar pranks and got by with the skin of my teeth but would not recommend people do this early in their career especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.