Email to the Universe

March 27, 2007 7:56 AM

Where can I send an email to the Universe?

I see I can send an email to god, e.g. http://stewdio.org/emailgod/ but this is not what I'm looking for. Also, it is not necessary, or even desirable, that another human read the email. I just want to send it out "there" and not bounce back. Any suggestions?

posted by allelopath to Computers & Internet (21 answers total)

You want to send an email that nobody will read?

Copy the text of a Spam from your inbox, and attach a file with your message. Send it to pretty much anyone. They won't read it.
posted by jozxyqk at 8:07 AM on March 27, 2007

Forwarding to /dev/null is the traditional way to do this IIRC. It will go and not come back.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:12 AM on March 27, 2007

Create an E-mail address on the universe's behalf. Generate a random password by bashing on the keys. Send all correspondence to the universe to that address. I guarantee the universe's ability to check its own E-mail.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:18 AM on March 27, 2007

you can send it to [e-mail]

I speak to the entire universe on a regular basis, and she told me that all email coming to her account is automatically deleted.
posted by grumblebee at 8:20 AM on March 27, 2007 [3 favorites]

If you really intend to send email to the universe this is a pointless and unanswerable question. Email is just the common name for a set of protocols that runs over a network which is specific to earth. If you mean you want to broadcast a message beyond earth then you really want radio signals.

There's a site that purports to transmit your blog into space, along with a form to send a one time message. It doesn't explain how it accomplishes it, but it's bright and shiny and looks like it's also behind a lot of the shill posts and mock grassroots marketing via paid reviews.
posted by substrate at 8:23 AM on March 27, 2007

Print it out and send it to your senator.
posted by dmd at 8:23 AM on March 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

(In happier times I would have omitted the first four words, but I'm pretty sure they don't read the printed stuff either any more.)
posted by dmd at 8:25 AM on March 27, 2007

I'd say radio's your best bet.

Either a gateway onto a radio network (some kind of email-to-packet-radio thing?) or a way to force the packets that make up your email to be routed onto an internet link that runs over radio (microwave?).

Either way some of that energy is going to leak into the universe and get lost in the noise.

In fact... got a WiFi hub? You're already emailing the universe... it's just a question of scale.
posted by Leon at 9:03 AM on March 27, 2007

[e-mail]

or whatever else you can think of. Anything sent to a spambob.org address is automatically deleted, no bounce back.
posted by kingjoeshmoe at 9:17 AM on March 27, 2007

Send it to [e-mail] and put "concerns about failure of Iraq War" in the subject line. Nobody will ever read that fucker.
posted by nanojath at 9:31 AM on March 27, 2007

Best answer: Mailinator is not a bad choice for this, as messages sent there can be read by anyone, but are generally read by no one, which is how I'd picture a message to the Universe. Sending to an address there would be somewhat like putting a message in a bottle and setting it out to sea. Except Mailinator deletes all messages after a few hours, so the odds of someone reading them, while non-zero, are significantly lowered.

As an example, I just checked the mailbox for [e-mail], and the universe, like the rest of us, mostly gets spam.
posted by Partial Law at 9:40 AM on March 27, 2007

There is no 'out there.' This isnt radio. An email is just some data that is sent to one specific server. If everything is valid then the data gets accepted as a piece of mail and becomes a small file (or set of files) on one single server somewhere.

Radio on the other hand really does go 'out there.' Its radiation. It radiates out.

Email is just a file. You might as well create a text file on your desktop and then delete it when you are done. Its essentially the same thing.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:11 AM on March 27, 2007

The internet equivalant of radio is probably usenet or as many people know it, google groups. Its public and lasts a long time.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:14 AM on March 27, 2007

This makes me wonder if it'd be cool to have a site that just shows a random e-mail sent to a certain address ONCE on each pageview. Once a mail has been seen, it's never seen again.. of course 99% would be junk, but some might be gems.
posted by wackybrit at 10:18 AM on March 27, 2007

Your belief system seems interesting.
You write "not another human" but not "nobody".
So I am guessing you are sending it to "somebody" who is not human.
If it was to be sent to a god, you could simply "pray it" or write it on a piece of paper and then burn it.
So it's not another human, nor a god.
And you apparently want the message to be emailed, not radioed, which means that you are not aiming for aliens.

So we have: not human + not a god + not outside of Earth + on the Internet = ?

Pure speculation, but it looks like you are trying to reach a so-called "intelligence" "emerging" from "the network". In that case, I would suggest to simply send your message traveling through the network between your own different addresses, like yahoo mail, gmail and hotmail. With good keywords in the title, it might catch the attention of the NSA and the emerging thingy.

If it works, please keep us posted.

/fanfic
posted by bru at 10:47 AM on March 27, 2007 [2 favorites]

Some cute suggestions here as to how to send email into a computer's trash, but not much on how to get it "out there." Oh well, I guess someone will say that their computer's trash is "in the universe" so there you go.

Craigslist used to beam certain messages into space. It looks like the people they partnered with are charging $99 to send messages now, which can contain text as well as other media.
posted by scarabic at 12:25 PM on March 27, 2007

If you forward it to a cell phone, which is easy, it will end up "out there, everywhere", albeit not very strong.
posted by smackfu at 12:30 PM on March 27, 2007

Pray.
posted by konolia at 1:32 PM on March 27, 2007

Not totally what you're after, but Email Roulette?
posted by divabat at 2:10 PM on March 27, 2007

The Anonymous Message Server is kind of like what wackybrit suggested.
posted by ALongDecember at 3:11 PM on March 27, 2007

Print it out and send it to my mother.
posted by kitmandu at 3:26 PM on March 27, 2007