Sendmail for matter transport

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Sendmail for matter transport

Okay, this posting is a bit obscure. But if you happen to have configured a sendmail.cf file in a past life as a system administrator, or if you've got a lot of experience with the way email gets munged on the net, you'll get a kick out of this.


From: ilaine@panix.com (Liz Stokes)
Date: 20 Jun 1995 20:40:18 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery
Subject: Re: Sendmail for matter transport (was Re: Users...)

What was that daniel.barlow@sjc.ox.ac.uk said? oh yes...

Ade Rixon (ajr@www.elsevier.co.uk) wrote:

A matter transporter based on sendmail? I have seen the future and it's f**king terrifying! Imagine:

a) People arrive at their destination with new heads;

b) People with blonde hair have it dyed brown because blonde is used by sendmail as a person delimiter;

c) Due to obscure config file errors, every tenth person loses a vital organ;

d) Organ transplants made on the fly, randomly;

e) People arriving with someone else stuck to their feet;

f) People arriving in five segments with a preamble that says, "To reassemble the original package, use the right sort of glue";

g) Some people mysteriously vanish and are never seen again. And you don't find out until five weeks later when someone wonders why your Australian auntie never did visit...

h) Some people spend five days bouncing back and forth between transporters, and are then "expired" by sendmail.

i) People over 6ft2 being rejected by some braindamaged gateway halfway between the source and destination site, and arriving back home with `Unknown mailer error 5' stamped on their forehead.

j) Lusers with forwarding loops

k) Security holes in the MTA that let unprivileged users fake people so that they look like they came from somewhere else (yeah, I know it's not a security hole so much as a standard bit of protocol, but would _you_ want to be PGP signed?)

Daniel "I teleported home one night, with Ron and Sid and Meg / Ron stole Meggie's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg" (scary how much Douglas Adams is appropriate to this group, isn't it?)

l) broken mail<->news gateways. 500 copies of yourself sitting in every news-spool on the 'Net.

n) *real* mailbombs. email a terrorist to president@whitehouse.gov

o) "Well honey, it happened like this. I thought I'd surprise you at work, but I mistyped your email address and got bounced to postmaster. The next thing I knew I was sitting in your bosses office. I wasn't exactly naked, I was wearing our pet boa constrictor..."

p) "Dear sysadmin, my parents emailed my brother to me for a visit, but I accidentaly deleted him when I tried to uudecode him. Can you restore him from tape backup for me? My parents will be really upset if I lost him"

"email - for when it absolutely has to get lost at the speed of light"

Have you found errors nontrivial or marginal, factual, analytical and illogical, arithmetical, temporal, or even typographical? Please let me know; drop me email. Thanks!
 

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