What Happens To Bounced @Donotreply.com E-Mails 286
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post's Security Fix blog today features a funny but scary interview with a guy in Seattle who owns the domain name donotreply.com. Apparently, everyone from major US banks to the Transportation Security Administration to contractors in Iraq use some variation on the address in the "From:" field of all e-mails sent out, with the result that bounced e-mails go to the owner of donotreply.com.'With the exception of extreme cases like those mentioned above, Faliszek says he long ago stopped trying to alert companies about the e-mails he was receiving. It's just not worth it: Faliszek said he is constantly threatened with lawsuits from companies who for one reason or another have a difficult time grasping why he is in possession of their internal documents and e-mails.'"
*Cough* (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Stupid on both sides (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like he is the one being hurt here. Of course somebody has to own that domain (I guess) and he decided too. Terrible domain name, but still not his fault.
Which brings me to:
All of these organizations and companies are just being cute by forging their FROM headers. Technically that should not be allowed, but you can do it anyways. They don't want to deal with it and they create "one-way" traffic by inserting bogus information into that header.
The problem is that bogus information is an actual domain that is active and running a mail server. They are treating it like is a reserved word.
The lawsuits are funny, since the header information will show conclusively that those people intentionally redirected the traffic to this guy. If anything, he can counter-sue.
The only thing I can think of is that donotreply.com becomes a reserved word, which is probably easier than getting all those mail administrators to change their behavior, or to get smarter.
In any case, the domain owner is without fault on this one. Unless you count being stupid as a fault, which picking that domain is a little unwise.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
My domain (Score:3, Insightful)
I got bored with replying (some guy in SanDiego is a real estate agent for ReMax, I don't think he ever got it), so I just limited what my mail server will accept.
Now it just bounces back to the sender and hopefully they think "oops, perhaps I shouldn't do that", which is what I believe this guy should do. Discourage the bad behavior, don't exploit it.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that I have thought about it a bit more, this is about the money. If they put donotreply@companydomain.com, then the inevitable replies would eat up their bandwidth and processing power on their incoming mail servers.
By forging that information, which is not good policy, they are intentionally redirecting that reply to somewhere else. They may have thought that the sending mail server would simply give a permanent delivery failure notice to the sender, but in this case that forged information leads to an active mail server which accepts all of those emails.
Who is the bigger "butthead" here? The companies intentionally forging their emails or the guy who owns this domain and is exploiting this companies (after they have already harassed him) to save a couple of animals?
Sell captured emails (Score:4, Insightful)
(no I didn't RTFA)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone bright enough to -think- having the messages bounce to another domain would save them money should be able to think that maybe just maybe if they have the messages bounce to another domain that this other domain might actually exist, accept that bounced mail, and even read it.
If they really wanted to save money, and not take that risk they could blacklist an address at their mail gates front door. That would eliminate most, but not all the cost of handling the return mail.
And it would be a simple matter to simply have it go to "donotreplay@donotreplay.company.com" which wouldn't have an MX record configured, and would thus never get anywhere. And being a subdomain of your own, it wouldn't be incidently delivered to someone else either.
step 3 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:you can own the headline domain (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A possible use for example.com (Score:3, Insightful)
I usually just do admin@domain, where domain is the domain of the stupid website I'm trying to access which pointlessly requires me to register first. The solution is to not require registration, rather than trying to block all the bullshit addresses the user might enter.
Re:you can own the headline domain (Score:3, Insightful)
Which makes us wonder, in turn, why YOU wanted to buy it...
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
Why even have a donotreply@company.com? How about customerservice@company.com? I guess that would make it too easy to get customer service.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
It does not. One is a general rule that holds true in the majority of situations, the reverse does not, which is why the original is recognized at all. It works in this specific case, or you would not even bring it up.
Harvest addresses, sell to spammers (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone dumb enough to reply to "donotreply" is likely to buy products from spam emails!
He could probably filter into lists based on the mail initiator, and the contents of the original email (quoted in the reply). Plus, the harvested emails are from currently active, valid accounts. These targeted lists of high-quality chumps would be worth paying extra for.
Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
If by putting fake header in an email, you're filling my email inbox, you're causing me damage, both in terms of stolen resources (you are consuming both bandwidth and storage space, both of which I pay for), and my own time in sorting through the chaff. You owe me for my costs, both in actual dollars and in time and effort. You can choose pay me a reasonable fee to cover my costs and efforts, or I'll let the government show you why you shouldn't have done it in the first place.
BTW, don't assume that law is the same as ethics. There are a lot illegal actions which are perfectly ethical, and vice versa. I choose ethics over law (which, at least in the US, has little meaning).
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're sending communication as email, you should expect communication as email back.
Re:at least the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Cough* (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition I'm pretty sure someone could probably find a way to use US copyright laws and make them pay money for using his domain name (Intellectual Property) without his permission.
Re:at least the US (Score:4, Insightful)
In this whole Rev. Wright thing, it's become very very apparent how the media neglects their responsibility to a)elevate the dialog and b)at least show a 5-minute clip before condemning a man. People expect all of their leaders to be saints, and it's ridiculous.
The only thing that Rev. Wright said that was ridiculous was that the govt created the AIDS virus to kill black people. But then, he also believes in a homonid living in the sky, so I give him a free pass on that. Beyond that, he said:
1. God doesn't bless America for killing innocent people, he damns America for killing innocent people.
2. And he said that our violence in the world begets violence at home.
Which are both teachings straight from the motherfucking Bible, everybody. People are pissed because a preacher preaches from the Bible? Come the fuck on.
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oh, look at that. my captcha is "tedious".