You are both right. Originally you could not email, and like the OP I kind of liked the ceremony of entrusting someone with a message to send from beyond the grave. But someone contributed the code to make the email work, likely after the OP's time.

Laurent FYI it didn't work (FYI we interacted over the cider font size thing). I couldn't find you anywhere even though I know your ldap.

It seems like Google from all the people who responded in this thread :)

It was there when I left several months ago, so I assume so. Or maybe I shouldn't, they started shuttering a lot of these kinds of things after layoffs.

It was still going at the time I left (~2y). Most of the work of keeping it alive had been done by others for the last decade, so I hope someone else is still carrying the torch.

We had the occasional HR interaction but to my recollection never anything nasty.

Initially it was a combination of just for the fun of it (it's a small script, as OP described). Secondarily there was the feeling of "everyone is going to go work at [major competitor]" and I was curious whether I could collect the data to show it. (I never ended up looking into this, but maybe HR did.)

As a dumb script it was not designed to be especially flexible. One thing I remember needing to fix was that by its nature it was archiving old data and preserving it, which meant that it was accidentally deadnaming trans people. My recollection is this was a small code fix, but an interesting lesson in social consequences of oblivious software.