Rec 2007 Internet Archive ✮ [ CERTIFIED ]

Because the incident was never a mainstream news story, the best evidence exists in:

If you don't have the local storage for 500GB of plain text, use the Internet Archive's Search inside feature.

Let’s look at a header example from a random post in rec.2007.bicycles: rec 2007 internet archive

From: bike_lawyer_42@example.com (Mark R.)
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.misc
Subject: Fixie brakes in Seattle rain?
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:32:11 -0800
Message-ID: <4f3a2b1c$0$20979$4c5d@news.att.com>
Lines: 24
Here is the complete, detailed story of the “rec 2007 Internet Archive” event — a fascinating and often misunderstood piece of digital history.
If you successfully navigate the "rec 2007 internet archive" search, here is a sample of the digital artifacts you might uncover: Because the incident was never a mainstream news
The rec 2007 crawler began visiting websites at high speed. On many sites, it encountered:

The crawler, following its programming, sent an email to each address it found. When it emailed an auto-responder, that auto-responder sent a reply. The crawler then saw the reply as a new email address to respond to, and emailed it back. This created an infinite loop: The crawler, following its programming, sent an email

Within hours, these loops were generating millions of emails per hour.