Blackholing My Email

Summary

In my own experience, it’s not particularly often that you find yourself asking your email provider to blackhole your primary, personal email address. But in 2002, a unique series of turn-of-the-millennium events had me doing exactly that to prevent our broadband account from being terminated.Back then, I was the owner of dv@btinternet.com - proudly so, as all other acceptable variations of “Dave”, “DaveJ”, and my firstname/surname appeared to have been taken by other subscribers to our ISP. To find an available 2-letter username that was vaguely similar to “Dave” felt lucky.The early 2000s were challenging for email, thanks to the emergence of highly-transmissable email worms. Perhaps most famously, the “ILOVEYOU” worm earned international attention as thousands of computer networks, schools, businesses and communities were brought down - in some cases destroyed - by virtue of this destructive virus deleting files and emailing itself to everyone who happened to be in the address list of any unfortunate (albeit Outlook-using) recipient. Even in 2000, that was millions upon millions of people.By 2002 these worms had evolved to become considerably more sophisticated - and sneaky - as their authors attempted to spread wider and faster. One of the most devastating changes - at least for my poor, poor inbox - was the ability to source email addresses of potential targets not just from the users address book, but from any and every text-like file on the user’s hard disk.At this point I was onto my fourth official CS map - Dust 2 - which meant at least 4 mentions of my personal email address in every CS installation. An email address that would pop up every time someone connected to a server running one of my maps, as part of the mission briefing:Dust - Bomb/Defuse by DaveJ (dv@btinternet.com) textures by Macman (MacManInfi@aol.com) Counter-Terrorists: Prevent Terrorists from bombing chemical weapon crates. Team members must defuse any bombs that threaten targeted areas. T...