Note To Self
I received some noteworthy email this morning. It was for some kind of penis enlargement gimmick, and took a surprisingly unfriendly tone, moving beyond “Men! Do you worry about your penis size?” into flat accusations: “Change your tiny and flaccid penis...”
I couldn’t take such accusations personally, even though it came from a personal address, and even though the sender would be in a position to know.
The sender was me.
Yes, I got insulting spam from my own frickin’ email address at the University of Illinois. Unless somebody else in Champagin-Urbana has taken up a prairienet account with my own name (It’s remotely possible), that account hasn’t even existed for over a decade. There was another grad student there at the time named “Michael David Lake,” which caused a bit of confusion now and then, but since he has no particular reason to belittle my manhood, I’m going to have to assume that the spam was sent under a false name.
Spammers commonly use the technique, posing as one user in order to bypass various spam blockers. Sending email under the name “spammer@spam.com” is a dead giveaway for automated engines, but email from “real person@somewhere.org” is less visible. More sophisticated blockers could check up on whether there was a real account still there to send it, but apparently my mail server doesn’t employ those. I suppose employing addresses to match (or half-match) the recipient is fairly cunning, if spam blockers make exceptions for near-matches on the assumption that a single user is copying material from one of his accounts to another, but I suspect this was just a funny coincidence.
It’s either that, or my past self has worked out the secret of time travel, decided to use it merely to vilify his future selves, then promptly forgotten the secret again—because I certainly don’t remember having the secret of time travel at any point in my life. This wild scenario better not be the case. That would mean I could be living in the lap of luxury today, had that tiny-dicked bastard not blown it all in a fit