I had a wonderfully silly idea yesterday.

As most people reading this will be all too aware, there's a very prolific email virus doing the rounds at the moment, which forges its sender address. Therefore, I'm currently getting a lot of bounce messages from systems which have received viruses purporting to be from me. This is mostly extremely irritating, of course, but now and then it's puzzling and entertaining, simply because of the weird email addresses whose existence is brought to my attention when they send me bounces.

One slightly surreal one a couple of weeks ago was ‘Star Trek Privacy’. This turned out to be an email address for managing the privacy policy at www.startrek.com. Presumably the real reason startrek.com needs a privacy policy is because they have some sort of web discussion board that people type their names into (I haven't actually looked); but I couldn't shake the feeling that perhaps all sorts of respectable office workers might lose their jobs in disgrace if it were to become known that they spoke fluent Klingon. Or that they sympathised more with (say) the Cardassians than with the Federation. Or, as Gareth suggested, perhaps it contains sensitive personal information such as ear measurements for alien head masks…

The other silly one that caught my eye today, and I can't even think up a coherent joke reason for this one, is ‘Panda Perimeter Scan’. Hmmm.