You've got mail!!!
Incoming: a roundup of my favorite email-related Wikipedia rabbit holes.
Ja Rule and Nelly in 2000
Buttbuttinate
Emails are common victims of the Scunthorpe Problem: a tendency for automatic profanity filters to mistakenly block innocent strings found in other words. For example, the word or string "ass" may be replaced by "butt"-- resulting in words like "buttbuttinate" instead of "assassinate." In 2003, members of Parliament at the British House of Commons realized that spam filters had blocked emails related to the Sexual Offenses Bill. And in October 2020, a profanity filter banned the word "bone" at a paleontology conference.
Guccifer the email hacker
Marcel Lazăr Lehel, or better known by the nickname Guccifer, was not just unemployed taxi driver in a Romanian village — he was also the hacker who broke into the email accounts of most top US political figures in 2013. According to the man himself, the nickname Guccifer is a reference to the "style of Gucci and the light of Lucifer." Without a formal education, he largely kicked off the Hillary Clinton email scandal and released shower-selfie portraits by George W. Bush. As Wikipedia puts it: “Lehel had no particular computer expertise, but instead used patience and persistence to obtain private information.”
George W Bush Self-Portrait (smoking gun)
Fraudulent Nigerian princes
So many people have been promised West African riches from a Nigerian prince that there is now a Wikipedia page dedicated to the "advance-fee scams" phenomenon. One reason Nigeria may have been singled out is the apparently comical, almost ludicrous nature of the promise. According to Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley, "by sending an email that repels all but the most gullible, the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select."
iSmell: email for scents
Can you imagine sending smells via the internet? I invented this in my head when I was in third grade. I think maybe we all did.
The Good News: Our collective fever dream was briefly real in 1999. It was a small device called iSmell that could be connected to a computer to activate smells based on online activity.
The Bad News: It didn’t last long. The problem wasn’t the performance of the product, which sprayed chemical combinations like a Febreeze can — it was the lack of demand. As Wikipedia puts it: "iSmell was trying to solve a problem that nobody had."
OOO
There's an out of office email generator that includes fun facts and quotes pulled from Wikipedia!
The wildest email addresses imaginable
Email addresses can have a surprising number of characters — who knew ()<>[]:,;@\\\”I#$%&’”+-/=?^_{}I~a”@example.org could be a real email? Here are some more silly examples on the list of valid email addresses:
Thanks for reading! Send your thoughts to hey@depthsof.com and send your most cruel criticism to ()<>[]:,;@\\\”I#$%&’”+-/=?^_{}I~a”@example.org.
Cartoon by Ellis Rosen
Bye! I love you! til next time!!
xoxo,
Annie