Blackholing My Email: how a two‑letter inbox was nuked by worms and forced offline

The fallout from a tiny address

A longtime Counter‑Strike mapper says he was driven to ask his email provider to "blackhole" his primary personal address after a wave of early‑2000s email worms turned his inbox into a landfill. What do you do when a beloved, lucky two‑letter username becomes a liability? You cut it off at the source. Short and ugly, but effective.

How a game credit became a faucet for malware

The mapper — who used the address dv@btinternet.com as a credit in widely distributed maps like Dust and Dust 2 — watched year‑by‑year escalation in worm sophistication. The ILOVEYOU fiasco was just the opening act; later worms such as Klez allegedly scraped email addresses not only from address books but from any text‑like file on infected drives. Those map readmes and mission briefings, bundled into millions of Counter‑Strike installs, made his address a recurring target. Cue thousands of infected messages a day. Outlook groaned. Space limits were hit. Chaos followed.

The tipping point and the blackhole

It has been reported that the deluge eventually filled the 15MB mailbox allowance provided by his ISP and that his father, the account holder, received warnings threatening broadband closure. Faced with the risk of losing the household connection, the mapper took the nuclear option: he asked the provider to blackhole the address, effectively making it a sink for mail so it would no longer reach users. It was a painful trade‑off — surrendering a rare username to stop the flood — and a vivid reminder that small digital footprints can have outsized consequences.

Why this still matters

This episode is more than nostalgia for the early internet’s wild west. It’s a neat case study in data exposure, unintended consequences, and how mainstream gaming culture intersected with emerging malware tactics. Today we talk about data minimization and credential hygiene; back then, a map credit did the trick. Funny? A little. Frustrating? Absolutely. And oddly prescient — the same forces that turned a credit line into a headache now fuel modern phishing and scraping economies.

Sources: johnsto.co.uk, Hacker News