I was the sysadmin for a local company that mainly did custom ecommerce & CMS site building for local companies. Way before I started they also provided email addresses to local residents, and the first like ~100 people to sign up got a free account for life. We offered like 250MB storage, which was pretty awesome in the pre-gmail days.

Anyway, one of the lucky residents to sign up was a very interesting guy. In and out of homeless shelters, he ran for mayor every election, and at one point built his own three-wheeled Segway-like thing that he decorated to look like a Roman chariot that he would ride around during the weekly farmer’s market.

So yea. One day we get a call and the usual tech support bump it up to me because they don’t understand it. I answer the phone and am met with a barrage of rants about how my company is in league with the satanic monsters at AOL trying to stop him from becoming mayor and how once he’s elected he’ll blow our cover and expose us all.

Dear reader, he was trying to send an email to an @aol.com account that didn’t exist, and was getting a “no such address” reply from their “mailer daemon” - their mail server software.

I didn’t know who he was before then, but that’s how I learned.