When I worked for a previous employer. I was going to be off work for about a week. I wanted to check my email from home. This was long before having email access on your phone or being able to remotely check email from another computer. I saw that the email program that we used had “rules” that you could establish on new emails in your inbox. For example, I could have emails from my boss go immediately into a folder for messages from him. The feature that I wanted to play with would automatically forward emails to someone else. I decided to use this feature to forward emails to my personal email address. This would get me the information that I wanted while I was away from work.
I decided to set up a trial to see if this would work correctly. I created a rule that would forward new emails to “Art Wheeler”. Unfortunately, this profile name for my personal email address was exactly the same profile name for my work email address. When I had someone send me an email for a trial, the program sent a copy of this email to my work address instead of my home address. The email program saw this as a new email and sent another copy. The program went into a continuous loop of sending itself emails. Luckily, I was able to stop the rule before it went very long. I changed the profile name for my personal email address and actually used this setup. But I received a lot of emails from myself before I was able to get it to stop.
This experience gave me an idea of how to create the equivalent of a virus. I could set the same type of rule for my email but this time it would be intentional. But I wouldn’t just send the email to myself. I would send it to a company-wide distribution list. Every time I receive a copy of the email that triggers this chain, it sends out a copy to everyone in the company, including me starting the process over again. Not only would it fill up my inbox, but it would also fill everyone else’s too. I could see it overwhelming an email system and potentially a company’s network. I’ve never done this on a large scale, just my small-scale accident. I’m just putting this out there as a suggestion if you if you are ever mad enough…