Okay, so it’s April 1st and we all got tricked by Debayan (our TA) saying there’s no final exam! Lot’s of us believed it and I even gave my neighbor a high five. Now I decided to put some prank to others, here’s how it went:

We decided to trick Yan into believing that his recent offer from Google was revoked. In order to do that, I wanted to send him a fake email that says sent from Google HR with the right email address, i.e. forge the sender’s name and address. Luckily this was covered last semester in networks classes, with very simple telnet and smtp methods. The code looks like this in command line:

C: telnet mail.yale.edu 25

S: 220 mr1.its.yale.edu

C: HELO foobar.yale.edu

S: 250 Hello foobar.cs.yale.edu, pleased to meet you

MAIL FROM: <human_resources@google.com>

S: 250 spoof@cs.yale.edu... Sender ok

C: RCPT TO: <foobar@yale.edu>

S: 250 foobar@yale.edu ... Recipient ok

C: DATA

S: 354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself

Date: April, 1 Jan 2014 4:30:27 -0500 (EST)

From: "Google Human Resources" <human_resources@google.com>

To: "Yan ..." <foobar@yale.edu>

Subject: Google Offer Revocation ...

Everything worked like a charm. It went through Gmail server and reached Mac Mail client, never raising a spam flag. Yan believed without a shadow of doubt and immediately reached his phone to call the number I provided, only to find out that he has dialed Palo Alto police department. He’s face was so dreadfully pale that I can never forget. We were at the other side of the window observing him and really tried extremely hard not to crack up. When he tried to call his real HR number, we opened the door and stopped him. Everyone was so amused while Yan himself even praised my brilliant idea! Check out the screenshot: