Anyway, proceed at your own risk.  I take no responsibility for you getting fired or disciplined for messing around with someone else’s PC.  Your IT department or co-worker might not look so favorably upon it.  And you’ll also want to make sure to lock your PC when you leave your desk as revenge will almost certainly be on the victim’s mind.

The prank has to do with taking advantage of Outlook’s Rules.  This is where you can have have things done automatically with incoming/outgoing messages.  What we’re going to do it set up a rule that will run a task when a certain message is received.  It’s also helpful to test this on your own machine first so that you can do it quickly and without getting noticed.

1.  In Outlook, select Rules and Alerts from the Tools menu and you’ll be presented with this screen,

2.  After clicking on the New Rule button, you’ll want to select Check Messages After They Arrive and then click Next.

3.  The next option to select is ‘”with specific words in the subject.”  What this allows you to do is send the person an email with a key in the subject line that will trigger an action.  Choose something unique that won’t get triggered by something else.  Click on the blue specific words text to add your text.  Click OK,  then Next.

4.  This is where you can be as benign or as evil as you wish.  You have a ton of options here.  My favorites are redirect it (not forward), play a sound, start an application, run a script, or all of the above.  

Redirect works like a forward except it doesn’t have the fwd: in the subject line.  Could be very evil as it makes it look like it comes from the victim.

The application option allows you to select any file.  You just have to select All File Types from the drop down menu.  Then select an image, a URL link, and any Windows file that has an associated program.  Evil pictures, evil PowerPoints, etc. are all possibilities.

Sounds can also play.

And if you’re very evil, you can have it run a .bat script to do pretty much anything you want.

There are other things to do.  But those are the ones I use most.

The most important part is to select “and permanently delete it.”  This prevents the victim from even seeing the message.  It will be a long time, if ever, that he/she knows what’s going on.

5.  The last step is to send your email to your victim.  Remember to include your keyword or you’re just sending weird blank emails to them.  You’ll probably want to vary it up a bit as to when you send them.  You could also be really crafty and have the email delayed for some time when you’re not in the office.  But then you don’t get to see/hear the prank.

Above all, have fun with it and don’t be too evil