[ryancnelson]

i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc...

One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "[e-mail]" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.

[jrockway]

They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it."

HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.

[litenboll]

Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle. As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.

[TheNewsIsHere]

I was once issued %%my full first name and last name%%@company.

It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains.

An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”.

Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.

[flutetornado]

I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.

[Lio]

That’s so Brazilian, in the sense of the film[1] not the country.

There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

[knotimpressed]

What were the details of paying $2000?

[bigfatkitten]

In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop. Our stock reports etc would come via email from qsecofr@<domain>.com.au.

The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.

I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.

[jamesfinlayson]

Dick Smith?

[bryanrasmussen]

this reminds me when I was at a course from a big software company in the late 90s, and we had problems setting up the system at first because some executive in Germany had named his machine localhost.

[MortyWaves]

How was that mess ever fixed?

[atulatul]

Was the co-worker called Newman?

I read the last sentence 'And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.' in Newman's voice:

From the Seinfeld episode The Diplomat's Club:

"I took over his route. And boy, were there a lot of dogs on that route."

[stfods]

Ah, I remember this feature, somewhere within Directory services setup. I have successfully obtained [e-mail] and a few more similar weird email addresses. Sometimes back is 2006 or 2007

[williamdclt]

I’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to [e-mail]?

[tuyiown]

(not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my shaky knowledge)

cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.

When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.

[sph]

IIRC cron writes stdout to the local mail spool (<user>@localhost). If the server is configured correctly, with an SMTP service for the domain, these emails are basically forwarded to <user>@<domain>

In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn’t happen anymore on recent distros.

[ecnahc515]

Cronjobs often run as root. If the host has is configured to send emails when a cronjob is completed it will default to sending it to user@domain where the user is the user the cronjob runs as, and the domain is what was configured in the cron configuration.

[onei]

If you want emails from some random internal machine, you can use one of the HPE SMTP servers. There was one for internal email, another for external iirc although I'm not sure there was a difference in practice. Those SMTP servers would do a DNS lookup before accepting the email.

When I set this sort of thing up, I'd get myself a hostname on an internal subdomain. But that was a truly miserable experience. It was a multi-stage form submission on a server I imagine to be the closest possible relation to an actual potato. It was soul-destroyingly slow. Alternatively, you could just pretend your machine was hpe.com - the hostname was valid, even if the IP was totally wrong, and the SMTP server would accept it.

My guess is that there was a bunch of stuff that pre-dated the HP/HPE split and they took the quick and dirty option whenever the old internal domain name got yanked during the changeover. And if your process runs as root, you get [e-mail] and hope there's something in the subject/body to identify the specific machine.

[ferguess_k]

Or something like "[e-mail]", where ab is whatever a mage system.