Dave.

That’s easy. Just fly somewhere and bring it in your carry-on, airport security will let you know.

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

Letting it ring has no impact. They have autodiallers that call, and when someone picks up, only then is that call assigned to someone in the call centre.

You can often tell this because there is a marked delay in the response to your initial “Hello?”. Long enough that you can reliably just hang up if you don’t hear a response in two seconds.

If it’s a real person who actually wants to call you and they you call again straight away, you can just shrug off your hang-up as a network issue.

There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to it. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work

Let me know if I can explain it more clearly.

Multi-part MIME containing inline images is actually what you’re looking for and it’s fairly easy to implement.

Here’s an example. They handwave over the html section that actually refers to the inline images that they embed, but that’s the basic layout you need.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/exchange_server_protocols/ms-oxcmail/7a08211a-760a-41af-8cab-0acf462c4094

I work in OT. The number of “best practice” IT mantras that companies mindlessly pick up and then slavishly follow to the detriment of their mainly-OT business is alarming.

Make your own damn best practice that suits your business best, don’t copy and paste something from a megacorp. Sure, include elements from megacorp’s best practice if they are applicable, but don’t be a slave to the entirety of it.