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May 11, 2008

My email address has been used fairly heavily today in the From: field of various medz, watches, and porn spam because I've been getting a fair amount of automated backscatter berating me for sending spam. Idiot mail server admins!

One of the backscatter messages, however, was a vacation notice from the mailbox of a woman named Inga at a Latvian computer company. In other words, the spam message (From: Most Trusted Replica <dannyg@dannyg.com>; Subject: Watch in the mail today) got through whatever (if any) filters at her company, and was delivered to her mailbox. That insertion triggered the vacation response.

Her notice advises that she'll be on vacation from Monday, October 8 through Friday, November 2. Looking back in the calendar, I see that those days and dates align with 2007.

Oh, dear.

So many questions come to mind:

• Did Inga never return from vacation?


• Was Inga fired while she was on vacation?


• Has Inga failed to turn off her vacation notification?


• If so, hasn't anyone in her company gotten one of these bouncebacks?


• If she's no longer at this computer company, why hasn't her account been deactivated?

And, most importantly:

• How does someone working at a six-year-old company—not one of its executives listed at the web site, mind you—score four weeks of vacation?

(Written begrudgingly by someone who has taken less than five weeks of vacation since 1981.)