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 "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
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.
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.
What were the details of paying $2000?
Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.
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.
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.
I’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to root@hpe.com?
(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.
If you ever come across a ~/dead.letter file, that's one way it can be misconfigured. ;)
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.
It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent, some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares, etc.
In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.
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.
Minor nitpicky correction: cron only sends an email if there's any stdout of the job.
This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.
Or something like "ab-production@company.com", where ab is whatever a mage system.
That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails — and to a CEO no less. I wish all my emails were so clear, direct, and personable.
I feel like I'm in crazy town...
Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com would go to me. This was a bad idea, I'm sorry. I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you, not to me. I think that makes more sense.
My apologies. Signed, new guy.
This was
> That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails
Why ? What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ?
"Hey, I'm gonna be late today, ate too many burritos last night and had to visit the hospital"
BOSS : Great idea, thanks
> PROFOUND!
Despite P&G, people tend to assume my name ends Or instead of Er, so I thought it'd be smoother to get firstname@domain.tld
Turns out folks used to firstinitiallastname@ get confused pretty much every time I tell them to get me at firstname@
That beats my similar anecdote.
At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name.
It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I had with them was them during my time there, was them declining my request to participate in something. :)
I did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete.
I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".
I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.
This post is particularly funny to me as well as I also had a very common name@apple.com email and I would often get sensitive emails, including travel info, sent to me - despite the fact that I had worked there longer than most peers.
I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.
A colleague had an email when they started that was very similar to an SVP. When they highlighted the confusion, it got fixed promptly.
If anything, all it taught me was that nobody at the company would bother to check directory before emailing.
Now that the company uses Slack however, I imagine there’s a lot less confusion.
34 years at Apple/Next. Amazing tenure!
$$$$$
Yes, that is one of the main incentives for working.
Mind blown. I remember getting very excited that my teacher in 1991 sent an email. I didn't see the email or use that computer. Just the concept that the email was sent to another country. Weird I barely remember what the email was about. But something along the lines of science and contacting another school.
This was such a great story.
Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him respected this.
Whilst working in corporate I tried to get matt@apple.com which was showing as free, but in fact somebody in retail had claimed it. Good for them!
I was mikel@apple.com for about a decade. I never got misdirected mail, probably because there aren’t all that many people with the first name "Mikel." The only other one I personally know of is Mikel Bancroft, who works at Franz, inc.
I had mark@apple.com during my time there, accidentally got added to one of the exec’s threads from Tim and felt pretty silly (and didn’t read anything in that thread, couldn’t delete it fast enough, had to email Tim to explain)
i nabbed complaints@apple.com for a while. that was pretty scarring actually.
I managed to claim my 4-letter-first-name@apple.com. Not having an English name definitely helps.
What if a new employee was named Steve Teve?
I first learned about the ability to apply for custom aliases at my university after noticing a guy I knew didn't have the usual pattern — first 5 of last name, first name initial, and nothing or else numbers 2+ depending upon your order in line. So I was 'millej3'.
Then I thought about the guy's name: D___ Hoover.
He had applied for, and got, 'hoover'.
I got an alias setup for my uni address. Although it asked where it should go, so I just directed it directly to my Gmail.
My inbox was closed after graduation. My forwarding alias worked for years after.
Unrelated fact, a university ending email domain is enough to prove student status for a lot of software.
Heh. I have a somewhat related story.
In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.
USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.
Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.
I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."
To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.
Hahahaha. I wish HN allowed the use of the joy emoji in response for these types of posts.
s(teve)2@next.com
It must have been a big difference between working for a cutting edge tech company like next and a regular company back then.
Great story, put a smile on my face.
If this kind of thing is up your alley, check out techemails.com
Wow this is such a neat website! Thanks for sharing!
> Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and
> set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com
> would go to me.
> This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.
> I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you,
> not to me. I think that makes more sense.
> My apologies.
> Signed, new guy.
What a great example of how to own a mistake, apologize, communicate, and get it fixed. I can think of so many past situations with coworkers that would have been so much better handled with quick communication like this.
Owning a mistake is amazing, actually I do believe it's one of the most important skills you need to learn in any profession. You won't learn it in University, only when you think the world is on the line.
It's a super nice example. Explain the situation as early as possible, don't be afraid and roll with it.
The fawning over the response bothers me no end.
It really is the perfect message. It's effective, efficient, impactful and human at the same time. No wonder they've had such a long tenure at Apple.
One thing that struck me reflecting on this is how much of Steve Job's mythos is about his harsh unrelenting treatment of his employees. I think notes like this shows that Steve must have shown a lot of gratitude as well which goes unnoticed because its less exciting to talk about.
This is how I find out next.com returns a 301 to apple.com. Fascinating!
For a while a few years ago they had it misconfigured and you could browse apple.com at next.com -- so pages like next.com/ipad worked.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130301092249/http://www.next.c...
Steve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT.
His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen
Oh my god what a gem: “it’s got a steep learning curve which is good because that means you learn a lot in a short period of time” hahaha
Absolutely stealing this
What a great video :). Interesting how some old ideas are new again. Thank you for sharing this and congrats to Steve Hayman for his tenure at Apple!
The idea of any official Apple presentation today beginning with a humorous rendition of _God Save the Queen_ is so absurd I can't help but smile at what we've lost.
In many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
AFAIK, WebObjects is still in use inside Apple, but also Project Wonder and WOLips have kept the tooling active (it all stopped working after Apple depreciated the Obj-C/Java bridge) and modern libraries for WebObjects.
It was probably no better than most of the other frameworks we have. Most things aren't. In a set of lots of things, it's more fun to speculate about the ones that we haven't seen, but there's a good chance they're about the same as the ones we have.
Steve is easily the most entertaining conference speaker I’ve had the pleasure to attend in person. He was a regular at MacSysAdmin for many years, and always in the Friday afternoon slot when you need a jolt of energy. Good times.
"It's got a steep learning curve but that's ok, because it means you learn a lot in a short period of time."
Watched only a short time, but the phone call were he pretends to be a lifeline for "who wants to be a millionaire" cracked me up.
At one point he asks someone in the front row if EOF is patented, and then blurts out "software patents are evil" amongst other things.
Really refreshing to see.
These two short emails are the best tech flex I’ve ever seen ;-) Nice one and enjoy your retirement!
Most wholesome HN post this year
My interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976:
"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"
"No, I'm Steve Jobs."
"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"
I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.
Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.
I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.
Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.
First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.
So the mythical Apple car project actually goes way back :)
That's a fun little story
The audio snippet was value enough to visit this page. Awesome story too!
It's a really cool story, but I can't help but feel a lot has be idealized around regular people who did extraordinary things.
I mean, Steve Jobs had to work with people, but he wasn't some prophet. He was a talented guy, who had his failures and successes, more of the latter.
It is a cool story, but if my boss of 15 years ago becomes world famous, I'm not going to personally treasure the email he sent with 4 words, possible 2 automated, write a blog post about it.
I'm just going to giggle to myself a little. Again, I might be in the minority here.
I’d hypothesize you would if you thought he was a great boss, and the opportunity to work there was unique.
Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction.
> Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction
I have a vision, not 20/20, but it involves you working for me. Good idea.
Write a blog about me when I'm gone.
Again, I like the guy, but you say this :
> to get something so visionary
In what world are 4 words visionary ?
"Great idea, thank you"
You're idealizing a boss you worked with..
That was a very sweet post, thank you.
It's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
It was 1991. They were an up start tech company. It was a different time.
You could also register a domain for free by sending an email form to a bot. It was truly the wild frontier.
The biggest factor is the small company… same could happen today.
And I'm sure it was the responsibility of a single person editing /etc/aliases in Emacs, not a big drawn out process too.
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive.
You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with very tight security, something will still happen. It’s best to have backups, a good restore plan, and a relaxed culture*. Or that’s what I think, anyway.
I’m in SME land though, not big tech. But then again, 99.99% companies are.
* common sense exceptions apply.
One of the biggest time sinks and "velocity" killers in BigTech, and sometimes also in MediumTech, is the need to get approval (sometimes multiple people's approvals) for absolutely everything. Often, approvers are among the most senior, busy people in the company, and "approving a dozen things" is not even top 100 on their list of things to do today. There are people who spend >75% of their time just "chasing" approvers and reminding them to please, please, please approve my Thing X so we can launch Product Y on time!
For sure. It kills projects and companies large and small.
In multinational megacorps this is more or less modus operandi. I am not even mad anymore, I realized this aint malice but simply inevitable as size goes up and time passes on.
The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.
I feel you. I keep hearing people in software say "wild west" when they mean "absence of paternalistic bureaucratic controls."
The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders as the physical space?
> but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom
Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?
Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.
Steve Jobs’s email was not taken away. A guy was allowed to register an alias self-service style. Everyone could reach Jobs on his email.
Registering an alias self-service style is fine. What's potentially problematic is changing that alias once it has become established. Please read my original comment again.
And every NeXT machine came with an email waiting in your inbox out of the box from sjobs@next.com complete with Lip Service voice message from Steve Jobs.
Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an internet email address like that at the time out of the box.
Even with the privacy concerns aside, you need individual mailboxes for reasons of maintaining organization.
I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.
The bigger issue is probably being allowed to set up an arbitrary one at _all_ without approvals. Once you have one, redirecting it is maybe not the biggest issue? Could still be problematic though.
This story is quite old, security culture in tech was really quite basic and forgotten in a lot of places. I would hope that a similar thing would not be allowed today at anything like a big company.
>security culture in tech was really quite non-existent
This is 1991, the actual number of people on the internet was tiny back then. Things like SMTP servers were commonly open relays (for some reason I'm remembering sendmail being an open relay out of the box).
A lot of the internet culture wasn't based on security, but of the premise you shouldn't be a dick.
It quickly changed in the next few years as the number of people online exploded.
Yep! A formative experience of my childhood was working out how to type SMTP commands over telnet and sending mail from billg@microsoft.com to my dad. Such "opportunities" vanished decades ago.
Fun times :)
Worked at an aerospace concern in the early 90s… for the first year or so there was no firewall. Yes, my Mac and PC directly on the internet with routable addresses.
I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped. CU-See-Me blew my mind. At some point I stood up a Quake server and invited friends to play. ;-)
Are you requesting a process and architecture retrospective on a company from 30 years ago? :-)
Oh this is about email. Thought it might be from the Xerox PARC tour, or the Sherlock app, etc.
Great story.
Have to ask…what’s up with that avatar for Tim Cook?
It's his image in Apple's internal employee directory, also used for emails. It's an old image, probably taken in the early 2000s.
Honestly, kind of sad that Tim Cook’s reply was so generic. I don’t think I’m off base in saying this, and from personal experience, he is really not connected to the people at the company.
The experience as CEO of a company with 10e2-10e3 headcount is a lot different than the experience with 10e4-10e6 headcount.
Any number of negative employees would be troubling, but I admit 9.9 million of them would be especially bad.
But the latter can often afford a secretary, if not a team of secretaries, to handle these sorts of things, with permission to add his signature.
Personally I'd either say nothing or farm the research out to an assistant for long tenure employees.
That's actually his personality based on my knowledge of interactions with him. He is sort of a workaholic robot.
There's no evidence that Steve Jobs knew Steve Hayman from Adam. "This was the only email I ever personally received from Steve Jobs."
He probably only knew him as Shayman
Hayman did a lot of WWDC presentations of WebObjects which was the only thing really keeping NeXT alive prior to the merger. He mentions elsewhere that towards the end Jobs was mostly at Pixar and NeXT was reduced to selling $50,000 WebObjects licenses but also had its first profitable quarter.
A big part of me has suspected, especially after reading biographies about him, that Pixar was simply better aligned with his creative side. NeXT was a business, one he knew well, but Pixar made things with computing and I think that really appealed to Jobs.
All speculation of course.
It would have been funnier if he replied with "Great idea, thank you."
I emailed Steve Jobs right after he came back to Apple and suggested they make a carry-able computer that could project the interface and keyboard input to any glass surface.
At that point, Steve was just starting to kill all the “moonshots” and “cool tech but who is really going to buy it” products like the Newton and OpenDoc. Even if he read the email, there’s no way he’d be interested in something like that at the time.
I'm not sure how a glass surface would work given how lasers interact with glass.
But this style of keyboard has been done in various forms as far back as '92. They're awful.
In 2010 I emailed Steve Jobs about an idea for improving iWork 09. I forgot what it was. No reply ever.
Did you get a reply?
and? did he reply?
I have absolutely no respect for Tim Cook anymore. I understood that Cook was the operations guy and not a product guy like Jobs.
I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like.
But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated.
Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from.
I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.
I love how sarcastic this reply comes across. Did it feel at all like that in the moment or was it received as earnest?
I didn’t pick up any sarcasm at all. It was a good idea which clearly hadn’t occurred to SJ himself, but would have been obvious once seeing the suggestion
Ok but for Pete’s sake, he was a CEO not a God - the geek hero worship is a bit excessive
On the one hand, an amusing anecdote about an interaction with someone that ended up becoming massively famous does come across as somewhat noteworthy, but on the other hand, the fact that Job's response basically translates to: "Um, ok." does make this kind of... sad?
Side effects of living in a world where wealth and power have become virtues. I think we subconsciously judge our own value based on how many degrees we came to stepping onto the world's "stage".
This is how I felt. A blog article 34 years later about a interaction so trivial that Jobs probably forgot it even happened 10 seconds later. I cringe a little. But hey whatever makes people happy.
I completely agree. Both emails from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are totally impersonal and routine. It's entirely possible they weren't even "personally sent" by either.
There's nothing wrong with the stories, just the overall sentiment behind them.
Hey, running into someone who is exceptional and having a fun story to tell about it is reasonable and doesn't deserve this negative energy.
That time I ran into Larry Bird, or just missed having dinner with Douglas Adams, or the time I talked to Jonny Kim-- they're little markers of time in my existence. I know they're not gods, and I've done pretty cool things myself, but I'm still in awe of the cool stuff they've done.
I have a famous person anecdote I enjoy telling.
More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house.
So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting.
We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.)
So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know?
And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”.
At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written).
Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.
Kevin Nash and I peed next to one another in an airport bathroom one time.
Well don't leave us hanging.
Steve was a temperamental guy. It's not geek hero worship, just being afraid of your boss, plus the timidness and vulnerability of being a new hire.
Have Jobs ever been a compter geek hero? Wozniak is the one people raise to the skys.
Steve is the hero of salesmen, consultants and CEO-s, should not be a hero for geeks and actual developers.
Geeks and developers can have multiple dimensions to their personality.
I respect Steve Jobs for his ruthless and uncompromising focus on quality and his attention to detail. He wasn't just a sales guy.
I mean, the salesman-CEO/founder is way better at selling themselves as a hero of tech & innovation than the engineer-CTO/founder.
Sending every new user an email with a "very personal welcome" and audio message for example.
Steve Jobs knew how to ship products people want. I have no respect for developers in a corporate settings who don’t ship.
Steve: what would this product be like if it were magical?
Engineer: I don’t think we can build that with our current technology.
Steve: I don’t give a fuck. You’re a nerd who is meant to like inventing. Do it.
It’s really easy when we live in the world of the Mac, and the iPhone to say “Ah it was inevitable” but Steve’s approach to product is what got us here. He made sure that the GUI was computers, that capacitive touchscreens were smart phones.
Being arguably the greatest product guy and salesman of all time is some feat.
We tell stories of things that are noteworthy. We find this to be entertaining.
Dude wrote a small anecdote on their blog and this is your response?
Yeah, a small anecdote on their blog after 34 years on the job. Does not seem like worship at all.
It is respect, not worship.
Where are you seeing geek hero worship here?