"In February 2004 in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname (pronounced "Coburn") with Hotmail. Separately he had problems with his workplace email because his job title, software specialist, contained the substring Cialis, an erectile dysfunction medication commonly included in spam e-mails."
Now that's just bad luck. It could've happened to any of us!
"It irks me how admins always ban my buddy, presumably because they think 88 in his nick is code for 'heil Hitler'. It's really unfair. Take care viagrapenis88!"
88 == SS?
8 as in, the 8th letter of the alphabet.
I live not too far from Scunthorpe and heard a story that Scunthorpe county council rolled out a new spam filter on the own email servers and no one in the council could sent any emails that day as they all got blocked.
This was a few decades ago and I can’t find a source but there are references to the origin here:
Different, but Essex University still has the domain sx.ac.uk to be able to work around daft profanity filters.
My first experience with this kind of brute force solver for a problem that isn't really a problem was actually 'wristwatch', not 'scunthorpe'. This was in the very early 1990's, and on a BBS, not an Internet-based system.
But I gather Scunthorpe was the first widely reported example.
It's the name of the problem, name of the font and to me one of the first cases I heard about.