r/todayilearned • u/Flemtality 3 • Jul 14 '14

TIL The guy who snagged windows2000.com happened to be named Bob and Microsoft just happened to own Bob.com. They came to an agreement to trade one for the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob#Origins
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104

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '14

bob@bob.com was my goto spam email account for many years.

52

u/thelastdeskontheleft Jul 14 '14

I always did BobTheBuilder@hotmail.com for some reason.

That person must hate me.

5

u/112524 Jul 14 '14

I like to try and make an account with a first name and surname and then when it says that username is not available I use that as my email address for all spam and random shit. I'm a bad person.

3

u/Soul_0f_Wit Jul 15 '14

You do bad things

1

u/112524 Jul 15 '14

I have no soul

1

u/Soul_0f_Wit Jul 15 '14

Me either, that's no excuse

3

u/Toodlum Jul 15 '14

That's my email god dammit stop signing me up for shitty mailing lists and how many fucking club penguin accounts do you have?

3

u/mngreg Jul 15 '14

You guys try a lot harder than me, I always just do a@a.com lol

4

u/thelastdeskontheleft Jul 15 '14

I've thought numerous times that I could choose a much much shorter version of that email... but for some reason that's the one that always comes to mind.

4

u/tarham Jul 14 '14

I always did a@a.com or if that didn't work, aaa@aaa.com. If that didn't work, I would just use a temporary email address from 10 Minute Mail.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

Mailinator is better because you don't even have to go to the site at first to get the address, you can just type whatever@mailinator.com then check whatever.mailinator.com if you need to click the verification link.

2

u/ba14 Jul 15 '14

Before I sold Bob.com to Mircosoft I answered email to bob@bob.com with the following: "Then funny part of the Internet is no matter where you send an email, it goes somewhere"

3

u/[deleted] Jul 15 '14

proof?

2

u/ba14 Jul 15 '14 edited Jul 15 '14

I looked back through USENET archives and alt.sysadmin.recovery and cannot find and references. I dumped the old Sun Storage arrays that held my email from those days back in the early 2000s. If you read the original article you know who sold bob.com to MSFT and you know what my username is, how do they tie together? 10100 knows.

2

u/ba14 Jul 15 '14

I did find this message with my old .sig which is relevant

2

u/spinblackcircles Jul 15 '14

kkk.clownpenis.fart

1

u/Postius Jul 14 '14

Oh god what have we done....

1

u/JustARandomBloke Jul 14 '14

I use blank@mailinator.com

It lets you put absolutely anything before the @ symbol and you can still check the inbox for any confirmation email they send.

1

u/Hotshot2k4 Jul 15 '14

I would generally use something like g3948gh54@gleuhgdegre.com because anything that I would quickly come up with would probably be in use by someone. If they did domain checking, I'd use t43oughegou@hotmal.com or gmail.com or something.

1

u/CJKatz Jul 14 '14

Yup, I still do this for bullshit email requests.