Revenge is sweeter than life itself. So think fools.
Last Friday my boss whipped up a program that would spam my phone with text messages. It was cute – until I had 350 unread text messages and my phone wouldn’t stop vibrating.
Over the weekend my thirst for vengeance overpowered me, and I decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. I spent about 30 minutes writing an app that would not only spam his phone with text messages, but fill his e-mail inbox too. Oh yes, that would show him!
Like most developers though, I can’t just leave well enough alone. An e-mail loop is just too simple, features must be added, functions must be enhanced.
Address spoofing – check.
Randomized subject lines – check.
Randomized content – check.
Then things got out of hand. Harmless subjects gave way to “Free Viagra!” and “You’re fired!”. Messages became, “I think I’m pregnant”. Worst of all, spoofed addresses went from mutual friends to mutual bosses.
At the time I thought my hellish little spam app was brilliant. When Jaime called I expected him to concede victory, to beg me to stop killing his inbox. Nope, not even close.
“Hey dude, I think you have a virus. It’s sending e-mails to Barry.” Barry is our boss’, boss.
Wait, what? I didn’t code it to do that. It would look like it came from him, but it surely wouldn’t send it to him. How could this be? I checked my e-mail to see if I was getting anything. There it was, Mr. Mailer Daemon informing me that my message could not be delivered. Apparently Jaime had disabled incoming text messages coming from e-mail gateways, and AT&T cheerily notified the sender each time one of these messages failed to deliver. Oh, damn. The one feature I didn’t add was the one to route the reply address back to me. Actually, in hindsight, I think the one feature missing was common sense.
I never got my revenge. I did get a heavy dose of humiliation, but everyone needs that once in a while.
For anyone wanting to hang themselves, or perhaps simply to amuse themselves at my expense, I posted the code below.
