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.'"
forgery? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:WTF (Score:4, Interesting)
Sort of like copying to file... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Stupid on both sides (Score:4, Interesting)
I operate an email servicing company. The costs of the bandwidth alone for millions of emails each week is NOT cheap. The server may not have to be that expensive, as it is only about 2 to 10 emails per second (approx. 2 per million), which is not that outrageous. Disk space is cheap these days and he can delete a lot of stuff coming in pretty fast.
However, that bandwidth is costing him money. A fair amount of it too. Hard to say, since he is in Seattle. I would think a couple hundred bucks a month all day long if not more.
So if he is spending that kind of money to keep it, it must be making him money. That's just my opinion....
How about nospam.com? (Score:4, Interesting)
At first I thought all this (domain hacks) was quite funny. However, it is unfortunate so many see the net as one big crime spree.
Re:I did this once. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Business plan (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:you can own the headline domain (Score:4, Interesting)
The guy has a gold mine, this is illegal... (Score:4, Interesting)
If I owned the domain, I'd be contacting every commercial enterprise who's email got bounced to me, and letting them know that for a nominal fee, they could avoid my getting the feds to take notice of their illegal activities.
Foo@bar.com has been my secretary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Uh, no... (Score:1, Interesting)
They used 'something@donotreply.com' as their email address, even though they didn't own 'donotreply.com'.
Then, they sent email to a bad address at another domain, who then bounced the message too 'something@donotreply.com'.
That's also pretty stupid.
Re:I have a suggestion: (Score:3, Interesting)
One night, very late, someone called and was quite upset that not only weren't we the pharmacy, but that we couldn't transfer their call to the pharmacist. This in the days when yoh could choose pluse or tone dial phones. My mom lost her cool and gave the caller quite a talking to.
The pharmacy owner called the next day and began to chew me out (I was home sick, sheesh) for being so rude to callers that had made such an innocent mistake. I shared with him what my mom said the caller said. And I let him know that I'd have my mom call him as soon as she got in.
We know the pharmacist's home numnber. He's on the City Council. Needless to say, my mom didn't call him until a little later in the evening. And he was both rude and upset. Especially when he realizes that he actually knows my mom from business dealings (ok,ok, she represented several manufacturing firms). We (I was her partner in crome a lot) attend the next Council meeting. He spies us.
Never heard from him again. We had that number for 12 years. He got over it. People still called all hours of the day and night. We usually just hung up after that.
Ah, the good old days of rotary dial.
node.com had similar problems. (Score:3, Interesting)
It first existed before canned sendmail configurations from vendors were common, when mail bounced from site to site much like Internet packets from router to router (rather than straight over the net to the target's Mail Transfer Agent), and most sites hacked up their own MTA configurations. A significant number of system administrators (especially at big companies and universities) got the bright idea that their users were likely to follow the manual too closely and send mail to "user@node.com". So they'd hotwire their MTA config such that mail to "@node.com" would bounce the mail with a friendly note to the user.
Of course that massively disrupted mail to node.com. So the sysadmin, from time to time, had to hunt down another "helpful" site's mail admin and educate him.
He also set up a "user"(@node.com) account and used the "vacation" program to send the "helpful letter", thus providing the service for the entire net. Vacation saves the incoming mail, too. It turns out the "problem" was essentially non-existent. "user@node.com" only got one or two mails per month - at least until some idiots used "user" and "node.com" as the default fields in their mailing list signup pages... And then the spammers got hold of it...
Re:*Cough* (Score:3, Interesting)
I bet he's at the Guantanamo Bay Resort and Re-education facility now...