email ping-pong

April 1st is still a few months away, so here's an idea for a bit of fun mischief you can plan in advance, this could throretically be used for a DoS attack, so dont be a jerk and go damaging innocent people's syetems.

Background: A lot of email services are set up with autoresponders, ie, when you send an email to customer service you get an automated response back like 'Thank you for contacting Shady Crooks Sp4m service, we'll get back to you soon. In the meantime...' blah blah blah. Now because it's an autoresponder you can send it *any* email and it'll make that response for you, and send it to your 'reply' address. Note that the reply address on emails does not have to be the same address you send from.

Method: Suppose you were to sign up for a free Yahoo China email address (read why you might have beef) and set up the return address on your email to one of these autoresponsers. Then you send a taunting email to Sp4m Associates, and the replay address is customer service at KKK.org or some other vile outfit.

What would happen? The Sp4m autoresponder fires an email at KKK, who fires one back at Sp4m, who sends another to KKK and so on, with your original taunting message at the bottom of each. Inboxes get full.

Bonus: OK, so that was a fun way to get at those sleazy cons who fill your inbox with junk every day. Can we make it better? You Bet! Suppose we find a whole list of these autoresponders :-) We'll open a text file and start saving them up for April 1st, every time you come across unsavoury 'businesses' online (like these guys).

Then we'll set up a POP3/SMTP to webmail relay (I'm not going to explain this, if you dont know how then you probably wont be covering your tracks well enough and shouldn't be hacking) and a little script to connect them all together. If we consider each autoresponder as a vertex then every time we send en email we're creating an edge on the graph, till they're all connected. Send the emails with a random delay of 5 to 10 minutes, and be sure to get a few back to throw off the anti-spam of the webmail you're sending from (which might automatically close your account).

Voila! Chaos.

And *please* dont use your own IP.

Happy April Fools!