The Bill Gates Incident

It seems like the natural thing to do when provided with something like my Insults By Mail service is to dig up the email address of someone rich and famous, and send them an insult.

Most of the time, these insults are simply ignored, thrown out with all the rest of the mail, I presume. (At least, there are no secret service agents knocking on my door, yet :-)

But one time, I did get a reply.

Someone who knew how to telnet to port 25 had sent me email, in Bill Gates' name, asking to be subscribed to the Insults Mailing List.

My ignorant mail-handling bot promptly signed Bill up for 1 insult a day.

About a week passed, and then I recieved mail from someone@microsoft.com. They were the poor soul who had to read Bill's email, they said, and the insults had been a novelty at first, but were beginning to be a waste of their time.

So, I pulled Bill off the list and never heard about it again. I don't know who the guy who reads Bill's mail is or if he told Bill about it, but it's been Kite's closest brush with a Famous Zillionaire yet..