That was a fun read.

Having worked as a sysadmin on the other end I can almost guess how his initial request was received.

As many others do they only read part of his request and were dumbfounded by the scale of it. So in their minds he was requesting way too much information and they probably spent days at the water cooler laughing at this guy under wrong pretences.

Eventually someone realized their misinterpretation and proceeded to make the dire mistake of exporting the e-mail headers with a cut off at a hard coded value I'm assuming. Instead of parsing out the headers from the email.

And it wasn't until he pointed this out to them that they started taking him seriously. :D