Pearly Pearl / Pearl Assurance Mishap
Bit of a long convoluted story this, so apologies for length/girth.
A good mate of mine had been over to France and got me a couple of cases of cheap plonk. When I asked him what I owed him, he hadn't worked it out and said he would send me "an invoice". Whilst on the phone discussing this transaction we were talking about a new Spam filter which our IT department had installed and how there were some peculiar words that were filtered out of emails. Particular examples were "Cock Master" and "Rimjaw" - all of which were a great source of mirth.
So my wine supplier obviously went away and did a fine job of knocking up a bogus invoice for Fatty's Wine Importers Ltd which included an invoice value for 12 Bottles of maison de Cockmaster and 24 bottles of Chateau de Rimjaw. Gleefully he typed in "Pearl" to his email address book and hits send......
A few minutes later, all hell breaks loose. My mate had not long started a new job at some IT support organistaion which had a major contract with Pearl Assurance. Little did he know but his invoice had winged its way to over 5000 recipients as far apart as LA and Sydney.
The head of Pearl's IT Security was soon on the blower querying why his entire organisation had a silly invoice for a couple of dozen bottles of nasty sounding booze.
(Pearly Pearl, Thu 26 May 2005, 15:39, Reply)