To troll hundreds of different niche internet groups of course.

waayyyy back in the days, like 2002, Yahoo Pool was pretty big and people used bots to make many many accounts that played with themselves (in something like pyramid structure) to boost accounts score. They were usually used with proxies to avoid yahoo protections. I don't remember if i did it, but I knew how to do it. There were also 2 big auto-aimers, hell they were fun and tourneys were fun too :)

Test accounts.

+1. I did the same. At the time I had to do this (around 2015), Yahoo was the least concerned about identifying duplicate accounts. I was testing for an actual paying job, not some side interest investigation, mind you. Some of the services I had to test were clever enough to reject fakeinbox accounts so I used Yahoo.

> I was testing for an actual paying job, not some side interest investigation

What difference would it make?

Do you mean to imply that creating test accounts is a little bit "wrong", and would be wrong for an individual to do at home, but it's OK to do it if someone else is paying you for it?

If so, I disagree on both counts: it's not wrong to create test accounts, but if it was, it would still be wrong even if someone is paying you to do it.

Hmm just a detail I thought to add, not trying to imply anything about the morality of it.

We've created a catch-all *@test.company.com with AWS SES & Lambda, all forwarded to a single [email protected] (a GApps group where the QA staff had access). Took a few tries to get right, but worked flawlessly from then on, saving testers' time every single day.

Russians.