Surreal e-mail morning....

Checked my inbox this morning, and thought I was still asleep and dreaming some weird surrealistic crap…

First thing in my box was an “undeliverable mail” message with the subject:

Returned mail: Too many hops 13 (7 max): from (my email) via mail1.gcn.net.tw to (unknown address)

I think it was something related to a note I had recently sent to another message board…but what does “too many hops” mean?? The next inbox message was related to the same note I sent, but totally incomprehensible:

**From: Àüº´»ó
Re: ÀÚµ¿´äÀå

¸ÞÀÏ º¸³» Áּż­ °¨»çÇÕ´Ï´Ù.
Ç×»ç »ý°¢ÇØ Áּż­ °¨»çÇϰí¿ä ´ã¹ø¿¡ ¶Ç ¸ÞÀÏ º¸³»µå¸±°Ô¿ä
°¨»çÇÕ´Ï´Ù. **

Am I still asleep??

yes.

there is no spoon.

it means don’t hop on pop!
Sheesh…

Hmm…I’d vote for still asleep.

There was a period when I started getting the standard automated “your inbox is too full” emails from my sysadmin…in random foreign languages. That was sort of surreal.

It means your message being sent from server to server looking for one that actually knows how to deliver it to the destination. If it hops too many times, it’s either caught in a loop or the destination server is (currently) non-existent, so there’s no sense in keeping on trying.

I keep getting weekly offers to make my penis larger. For awhile I was getting personalized penile effrontery, but that gave way to messages with the title, “YOUR DICK SO BIG YOU TRIP OVER IT” AND, “YOUR DICK SO BIG USE IT AS A WEAPON”.

My friends were all wondering why I kept forwarding illicit viagra spam to them, they never saw the humour.

FWIW, the mail server that bounced your message is in Taiwan (the .tw top-level domain), and I suspect the second message was composed using an Asian language encoding (probably Chinese). Your e-mail client is set up for that encoding, so it’s displaying as gibberish.

The message is in Korean. From Jung Byung-san, to (if I’m reading this right) “automatic reply system”. It says thank you a few times, something about being written in red ink (probably an idiom that I don’t know), and I think it says something along the lines of “please try again”.

My Korean isn’t too good. But boy, can I order pizzas…