At a web startup I worked at in 2008, we had some automated emails sent to all our users. We didn't have sendmail or postfix or whatever properly configured and so the emails came from nobody@ourdomain.com. Our CEO was pissed because he didn't understand that it wasn't like some intentional joke by our engineering team.
My first real job was to work with another intern to write a “tool to keep track of who’s been trained on what” since they were doing it with a spreadsheet. This was in 2001.
We wrote it on the LAMP stack which gave us the full suite of whatever you could find on a Linux CD at the time.
Fancy graphs? No problem.
Send reminder emails? Sure boss! We dutifully started hacking and testing and hacking to get that function in.
To test, we decided to send emails to jackfrost, santa, and so on from our own sendmail server to the corporate mail server. It worked fine because we weren’t spamming it, we were just sending a few messages every now and then as we debugged.
Turns out there’s really a Jack Frost that worked for us.
He was not pleased.
We were amused.
I think we apologized, and I forget how we figured out he was a real person.
