Back in the earliest of early days, I (The Foo at bar.com) got a few emails a week, mostly from sysadmin type people who were invoking The Foo in an effort to debug some kind of system or other.
Of course I, being a gregarious sort, answered the messages. Mostly along the lines of “hello? Foo here. What can I do for you?” or “who you? I Foo.”
I met a lot of really interesting people in 1994 and 1995 that way.
But soon I had to return to obscurity, as my email volume turned into craziness.
Y’see people building web sites started putting little “give us your email address and we’ll let you see the goodies” challenges in their web sites, and lots of folks entered [email protected].
Soon, I was getting thousands, then tens of thousands of emails a day, mostly from people who didn’t care whether I replied or not. Alas, I was overwhelmed and had to return to my solitary life.
For a while, I MX’d email addressed to me to 127.0.0.1 but that made some people cranky (although I still take some quiet pleasure at the thought of what that address did to spammers).
I MX’d the mail over to a friend’s spam-detection system for about 4 hours one time, but the volume crashed his server and he asked for relief.
So now I’m content to tell you this small story.
PS: My friend Mike O’Connor manages this domain for me.