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I almost got kicked out of school for this! I sent an email to my girlfriend from some girl that we didn't like, saying something like "you're a huge bitch, haha just kidding this is actually jballs not the chick we don't like."

Problem is that I wrote my girlfriend's email address wrong, so it bounced back to the sender (the girl we didn't like).

So I had to explain to a university dean exactly what I did and how I didn't actually "hack into" the girl's email account. That was fun.

Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.

I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.

Also related.

I sent my gmail address an email from [email protected] and it worked.

When I was in schoola classmate set up an instance that is designed for hacking. But another classmate took it in another direction. Instead of following the clues to the answer (it's a game) they instead hacked the instance and created a folder bomb but named the folders with the Mongolian space separator character. So removing them because a task. No body got upset because well... Hacking can be fun!

Second: hacking is the term used when you break into something to make it better.

Cracking is the term used when you break into things for malicious intent

Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It's almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.

Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.