Technical Support Offered

I'd just like to offer my technical support to Justin McKeating, Tim Ireland, Sam Coates at the Times, Three Line Whip, Kevin Maguire and Tom Watson MP.

Before leaping to conclusions next time, stop, think for a minute, and then learn to read email headers. And that doesn't mean just obsessing over the "To" address and the "From" address and whatever labels are next to them. It means looking at what MTAs the mail passed through to reach its final destination. Then what you do is find out what MTA and packages the originating server might be running.

For extra credit you could perhaps read RFC 821 as well just to get a feel of how mail actually works, and then perhaps you could ask someone that knows about computers to set-up MajorDomo for you! You can start sending email with manipulated content to distribution lists too! It's quite exciting really. Just imagine the fun you could have? You could let people email an address and then change the content of their email and put a footer in it. How awesome is that?

If by this point you're feeling particularly hardcore perhaps you could open up a shell and learn to use telnet and send your own "hacked" emails to people, you won't even need a '1234' password to do it either!* I won't tell you how to do it, consider it homework. Just think what it would mean if you followed some of these tips though. First of all you'd stop making yourself look silly, but even better for some of you, you might actually get close to being the technical wizards that you like to make people think you are!

On a serious note though guys, it doesn't take a genius to look at that mail posted by Three Line Whip and realise its gone through a distribution server and had content inserted.

This post was brought to you by Dizzy Technical Support - Opening the bonnet of teh Interroadsuperwebway.

* Should you find an Open Relay when doing your homework you should do the right thing and contact the server admin and tell him he's an idiot for leaving it open to exploitation. It is what he deserves, it will probably be a Windows box.
** Here's a tip for your homework. Try pressing Alt and F4 at the same time. Go on.. try it, it;s a well guarded techie secret easter egg function in all operating systems I swear.