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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 \u201cDave\u201d, \u201cDaveJ\u201d, 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 \u201cDave\u201d felt lucky. The early 2000s were challenging for email, thanks to the emergence of highly-transmissable email worms. Perhaps most famously, the \u201cILOVEYOU\u201d 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\u2019s 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\nby DaveJ (dv@btinternet.com)\ntextures by Macman (MacManInfi@aol.com)\n\nCounter-Terrorists: Prevent Terrorists\nfrom bombing chemical weapon crates.\nTeam members must defuse any bombs \nthat threaten targeted areas.\n\nTerrorists: The Terrorist carrying the\nC4 must destroy one of the chemical \nweapon stashes. \n\nOther Notes: There are 2 chemical \nweapon stashes in the mission. \n\n(Press FIRE to continue) This was de_dust.txt - equivalents existed for Dust 2 and Cobble, plus the overall readme.txt . All contributors to CS had their email listed somewhere in every single installation of the most popular multiplayer FPS of the time, a title primarily installed onto internet-connected computers, during a period of highly virulent email worms that spread exclusively via the internet. You see where this is going\u2026 My dv@btinternet.com account soon started receiving tens, and then hundreds, of emails a day from worms such as \u201cKlez\u201d - so many that Outlook (mine was patched, thankfully) could no longer load my inbox anymore. I had to use a dedicated POP3 tool that would let me rapidly scan and remove troublesome emails beforehand to let the legitimate ones through. Mercifully, trashable emails were easily identified by common patterns in the subject line, so this only took a few minutes a day to restore inbox access. Alas, this didn\u2019t last. Before long those few hundred emails a day I was receiving became thousands of emails a day, which easily occupied the entirety of the at-the-time generous 15MB (megabytes!) of mailbox space so gracefully bestowed to me by BT, our ISP. Worst still, worm authors had become somewhat more creative with their email structure to evade bulk identification and removal, utilising randomly-constructed subject lines, bodies, feigned headers, stolen file attachments, and - most annoyingly - using spoofed sender addresses, again using harvested data from whatever address books and files they came across. My dad (the actual account holder) started to receive warnings about email usage. Our broadband account faced the risk of closure. The game was up. My precious 2-letter email address was unusable - any valid emails were being completely lost amongst all the infected ones, my inbox was too full to receive new emails, and even many of the valid ones that did get through were accusations of me sending them a worm (remember those spoofed headers?) I had little choice but to ask BT Customer Service to blackhole dv@btinternet.com to save our account, to protect their email service, and to prevent creating a storm of unexpected bounced emails to the poor souls whose addresses had been randomly chosen as the spoofed \u201cfrom\u201d address. 24 years later, and my dad\u2019s BT Internet account is still around. Out of curiosity, I tried to log in and see if I could find the current state of dv@btinternet.com - but that functionality was removed some years ago, and it\u2019s not possible to create new inboxes anymore. I tried sending an email to it - and got a regular \u201cUser unknown\u201d reply back, indicating that at some point the blackhole was removed, and the account simply became non-existent. I\u2019d be curious to know if it is still receiving any email worms all these years later. (../../blog/2024-dev-notes/) 2024 Dev Notes \u00bb \u00a9 David Johnston. All trademarks and trademarked content (such as screenshots) are the properties of their respective owners. Except where noted, all other content is licensed under a (//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License . Site generated with (http://hugo.spf13.com) Hugo . 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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 \u201cDave\u201d, \u201cDaveJ\u201d, 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 \u201cDave\u201d felt lucky.The early 2000s were challenging for email, thanks to the emergence of highly-transmissable email worms. Perhaps most famously, the \u201cILOVEYOU\u201d 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\u2019s 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\nby DaveJ (dv@btinternet.com)\ntextures by Macman (MacManInfi@aol.com)\n\nCounter-Terrorists: Prevent Terrorists\nfrom bombing chemical weapon crates.\nTeam members must defuse any bombs \nthat threaten targeted areas.\n\nTerrorists: The Terrorist carrying the\nC4 must destroy one of the chemical \nweapon stashes. \n\nOther Notes: There are 2 chemical \nweapon stashes in the mission. \n\n(Press FIRE to continue)\nThis was de_dust.txt - equivalents existed for Dust 2 and Cobble, plus the overall readme.txt. All contributors to CS had their email listed somewhere in every single installation of the most popular multiplayer FPS of the time, a title primarily installed onto internet-connected computers, during a period of highly virulent email worms that spread exclusively via the internet.You see where this is going\u2026My dv@btinternet.com account soon started receiving tens, and then hundreds, of emails a day from worms such as \u201cKlez\u201d - so many that Outlook (mine was patched, thankfully) could no longer load my inbox anymore. I had to use a dedicated POP3 tool that would let me rapidly scan and remove troublesome emails beforehand to let the legitimate ones through. Mercifully, trashable emails were easily identified by common patterns in the subject line, so this only took a few minutes a day to restore inbox access.Alas, this didn\u2019t last.Before long those few hundred emails a day I was receiving became thousands of emails a day, which easily occupied the entirety of the at-the-time generous 15MB (megabytes!) of mailbox space so gracefully bestowed to me by BT, our ISP. Worst still, worm authors had become somewhat more creative with their email structure to evade bulk identification and removal, utilising randomly-constructed subject lines, bodies, feigned headers, stolen file attachments, and - most annoyingly - using spoofed sender addresses, again using harvested data from whatever address books and files they came across.My dad (the actual account holder) started to receive warnings about email usage. Our broadband account faced the risk of closure.The game was up. My precious 2-letter email address was unusable - any valid emails were being completely lost amongst all the infected ones, my inbox was too full to receive new emails, and even many of the valid ones that did get through were accusations of me sending them a worm (remember those spoofed headers?) I had little choice but to ask BT Customer Service to blackhole dv@btinternet.com to save our account, to protect their email service, and to prevent creating a storm of unexpected bounced emails to the poor souls whose addresses had been randomly chosen as the spoofed \u201cfrom\u201d address.24 years later, and my dad\u2019s BT Internet account is still around. Out of curiosity, I tried to log in and see if I could find the current state of dv@btinternet.com - but that functionality was removed some years ago, and it\u2019s not possible to create new inboxes anymore. 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