E-mail technical support warning

by Charles Miller on March 18, 2004

I've started receiving emails that look something like this:

Dear user of Pastiche.org e-mail server gateway,
Your e-mail account has been temporary disabled because of unauthorized access.
Pay attention on attached file.
Have a good day,
The Pastiche.org team       http://www.pastiche.org

The attachment, obviously enough, is yet another email-borne worm. However, seeing as I am the Pastiche.org team (and have been since 1997), these mails always give me a bit of a double-take.

Once, when I was more active on Usenet, somebody complained to my postmaster about me: I had apparently committed some egregious crime against humanity by flaming him, and my account deserved to be pulled immediately. The postmaster@pastiche.org address is aliased to my regular inbox. I replied (from the postmaster address):

Thankyou for registering your complaint about this user. He is an habitual troublemaker, and in accordance with our zero-tolerance policy for Internet troublemakers we have had him shot. Have a nice day.

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