And it started with spam, so much spam.
Back in the early 2000s — the dial-up days, when inboxes wheezed like modems and spam flowed as freely as coffee in the NOC — I was leading the IT team for a family-owned business with a strong DIY culture.
Strong enough, in fact, that when I joined in mid-2000, customer service email was still on AOL, and all internet access was running over dial-up.
One of my early projects was rolling out GroupWise, complete with modern(ish) internet email. Which, naturally, opened the floodgates to something users hadn’t encountered before: SPAM.
Buckets of it. Cans of it. Monty Python sketch levels of it.
The complaints were loud and frequent — and deserved. So there we were, myself and two of our network guys, hunkered down in the NOC late into the night during a scheduled maintenance window, configuring a new anti-spam tool and prepping for a little “live-fire” testing.
thisisatest.com? Nope.
This tool had a feature that could detect and block floods of incoming mail from known senders — but of course, to test that, we needed to create a flood.
We found a mail-sending utility that fit the job (let’s just say it wasn’t exactly featured in PC Magazine’s “Top 10 Ethical Tools of 2002”) and realized we’d need a domain to send the test email from.
So off I went to Network Solutions, credit card in hand, running on caffeine and brain fumes. I wasn’t trying to be clever — just needed something quick and obvious.
testing.com— taken.thisisatest.com— taken.thisisonlyatest.com— ding, ding, ding!
And just like that, thisisonlyatest.com was born.
We used it to hammer that anti-spam tool — and it passed beautifully. Mission accomplished.
Side Story: The Legend of Dan and the “Hello Kitty” Bomb
As part of our test, we needed a real mailbox to receive the message flood — both before and after enabling the filtering. Could we have set up a test inbox?
Of course.
But you know that feeling when it’s late, you’re still at work, sugar’s winning over logic, and things start to get a little… loose?
Well, one of our systems analysts — let’s call him Dan — had the misfortune of being both a great sport and the nearest logged-in user at the time.
So Dan became the target.
30,000+ emails.
All with the subject line: “Hello Kitty.”
Legend has it he spent half the next morning waiting for his GroupWise mailbox to sync — and from that day forward, he received Hello Kitty gifts at every birthday, holiday, and project milestone. It became an inside joke, and a lasting symbol of a team that knew how to work hard, prank harder, and keep it light even when the packets were stacked against us.
So that’s how I ended up with this domain.
It started as a tool for spam testing, and years later, it still lives — repurposed now for something entirely different:
A blog about the road, the ride, the bench, and the occasional nostalgic detour.
This is only a test.
But I’m keeping it.