I send all my test emails to test@tickle.com. I’ve no idea if anybody owns that, but if they do I hope they enjoy all the bizarre invoices I’ve sent there over the years…
My cousin set his parents email address as the test email in a pre-production database. Eventually the pre-production database became a production database and they ended up getting a lot of boxes for things that they haven’t ordered or paid for. I think they ended up receiving one of everything that the company actually sells in every possible variation.
This reminded me of the guy that bought asdf.com, according to the website he would get all sorts of mails at asdf@asdf.com I remember this from way back on the boom of the internet, surprised the site is still up.
Every time I have imposter syndrome (at 51 years old, even), I see crap like this and think: Why do I sell myself short? Because I’m not the smarted tool in the shed, but jesus christ I ain’t THIS stupid. Anyone pulling that stupidity should feel nothing but shame. Ugh.
I’m not the smarted tool in the shed
🤦♂️
DO NOT MAEK FUN OF MY TYEPING, I AHVE IMPROSTER SYNDORM
hehehe
Thankfully I do understand irony. And I’m leaving it there so others can point and laugh. :D
well, the years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’
Thanks mate - you made me spit out my tea 😆
oh geez, I didn’t mean to cause a disaster! D: lol
Okay, but on mobile I have to say I mean the correct thing and often have to correct multiple time, often editing afterwards.
I’m confused as to how and why people would even want to send an email to anybody@noreply.net.
I often get email that says “do not reply to this email” and it appears to be sent from noreply@our.domain. This I understand. So am I understanding correctly that many companies/mailing systems use @noreply.net in the same manner?
But why? Why not to noreply@our.domain?
I have a firstname.lastname[at]gmail.com email address.
Every single week I get a different person’s legitimate email because they forget their email is firstname.lastname12345[at]gmail.com or some other number, and sign me up for stuff…
I get bank statements, rent notices, holiday bookings, xbox live accounts, kayak club membership emails, pizza delivery receipts, Amazon.com accounts and purchases…
You name it…
XKCD calls it “Reverse ID Theft” - I call it “Identity Donation”: it’s like people think: “here… Be me for a bit… See how you like it…”
Well that XKCD comic nailed it. There is a doctor in another state with my name and occasionally patients send me their prescription questions.
I also had to specifically ask a lady with a similar phone number to stop giving mine out.
Hah. I have a first initial + last name Gmail address. I occasionally get an email meant for somebody else, but one time I got an email about “plans for the wedding” and it was an itinerary for the bridal party etc. I had to respond to that one and be like “Hey you have the wrong email address”
I could have messed with them. Or shown up for the wedding or whatever, but I didn’t want to ruin somebody’s special day. It wasn’t the fun thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.
read the article
I did. It does not answer this particular question
Sounds like this guy knows way more than me…
“It is too much,” Solovewicz says, emphasizing that people shouldn’t assume a domain is unmonitored. “I’m at the point where this would now be a full-time job to handle every single one of these—that’s part of my motivation to talk about this, it is my responsible disclosure. You guys need to fix your systems and not do this and not leak your customer data and your employee data and your own internal data.”
But couldn’t he just set up an “out of office” so that every single time he gets an email, a response is sent saying:
Hey bro, this is a real email address, you just sent me stuff you probably shouldn’t. No big deal, but you’re going to keep getting this automated emails. Please fix your security.
If you get stuck in a loop of automated messages (likely) that’s going to flow a massive flag up at the company, and someone is going to look at it why it’s happening.
It’s impossible for a human to handle it, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be handled.
The domain would get flagged as spam for sending that many emails
Anytime you autoreply to email, it means a spammer can spoof the sender and spam you with hundreds of emails, which you will faithfully reply with “This address is not monitored” - but you’re sending those replies out to people who didn’t send them to you, and typically attaching the original message, meaning the spammers get a free spam reflection service from you - you sending their spam to all those people.
So please don’t use autoresponders.
Or only use it on domains with SPF set up for hard fail, and for emails that pass SPF
What started out as a personal email project has become a large-scale effort to warn businesses and other groups that they have misconfigured their internal systems and are accidentally sharing sensitive information.
Traitor…
…
If a corp is sending your personal information to random email addresses, it is in your best interest for them to stop.
This person, is trying to get corps to stop, because it’s bad for people.
They are not trying to save corps at the expense of people, which is what you seem to think is happening
If you quietly contract the company, they with to mitigate corporate liability any benefit to you as user is unintentional. Say it loud and publicly and you empower users to start cleaning up the mess created by company and company gets public shame and pressure to actually fix. Literally no reason to quietly appeal to companies first, both are covered if you go public first
Welp, I feel any future attempt to explain something to you will work out the same…
And I’m not signing up for that hassle and frustration
“Man attempts to stop corporatuons from leaking data”
“Hey fuck that guy!”
???
Please explain your reasoning for calling him a traitor.
Because it’s not an accident. And he’s quietly going to the businesses first to try to let them internally address and attempt to cover up and only going public as a last resort.
As a person, and not a business, his loyalty should be to people. The bully only responds to sunlight.
But why? Why are they sending corporate data to a website they don’t own?
What’s the point?
The
@deleteduser.comexample is the easiest to explainA user, Bob, has an account and has attached his email address. Later, Bob says he wants to delete the account. For legitimate reasons, the company doesn’t want to delete all associated records (think, user generated content or user to user interactions that shouldn’t simply disappear. Or maybe audited transactions.)
The company also doesn’t want to have those associated records pointing to nothing … maybe the schema doesn’t support that (eg required foreign key constraints) so it has to point to something
So the company changes Bob’s account details. They delete his profile picture, his phone number, etc. but Name and Email are required by the database. Their deletion process changes Bob’s name to
deleted_userand they change his email todeleted@deleteduser.comthinking that’s a dead domain that’ll never be valid to receive emails.Later, another process triggers an email. Someone sends Bob’s account a message, replies to a thread, etc. this process doesn’t know / care that Bob’s account was deleted so it fires the email to
deleted@deleteduser.comThere are a lot of problems with the decision making here, and there are better ways to handle all of this. But these are all rational decisions in the moment that can cause an email to be sent to an “invalid” email address
As in my other comment, I don’t understand why they don’t use deleted_user@our-company.com? It doesn’t take an IT-specialist to see the dangers in using a domain they don’t control.
But I guess that’s the point of this article: the jaw-dropping stupidity.
Most people who aren’t interested in tech have to be taught this as they have no idea what e-mail actually is.
I worked in a company where we had to write addresses like that 10-30 times a day.
Someone once used fucking gmail and all hell broke loose.
Most people who aren’t interested in tech have to be taught this as they have no idea what e-mail actually is.
I would have accepted this 20 years ago, but not anymore. People need to have a basic understanding of how the tools they use daily work. I know, they don’t. And it’s one of my pet conspiracy theories that Big Tech abstracts their users away from how things actually work on purpose. The results are devastating, esp. when it comes to where IT tech crosses politics.
Also general education is commonly lagging at least a decade after current tech. I know email has been around for longer than that, but IT education is in a sad state.
That certainly is part of the problem.
It’s still a stupid solution with all sorts of ‘code smells’ and bad design, but the least they could do in a case like that is use
@example.com.Is example.com the only reserved dead domain by icann? Just curious
Edit: seems like so. Though there are some reserved TLDs as well
Oooh, looking at RFC2606 (mentioned by your link), the
.invalidTLD seems like an appropriate choice here.(Changing “deleted” users’ emails to an invalid TLD still isn’t the right solution, though.)
Better than an un-reserved domain name or tld
Thanks. That kind of makes sense.
As you say, “at the time, a reasonable decision”. What I don’t understand tho, is, why nobody, for five seconds, maybe thought, how it could be a good idea to just filter this standard address at the SMTP server to be redirected to something sensible inside the org. My best guess is, different departments / sub orgs.
Distributed decision making, and these are all systems that are transactional or regulatory and not necessarily driving revenue / customer value.
The IT / Systems team was told “stand up an SMTP server so we can send emails” and there’s no more discussion of capturing / trapping / dead boxes. And as an engineer if you start to add that scope, “why are you taking so long? I just need to send emails.”
And then the delete account project is “GDRP says we need to delete accounts. So delete them in the least expensive way possible.” Which means, as an engineer, don’t spend a ton of time on this. In my previous company, we were still manually deleting accounts. As in SRE connected to the DB and ran a SQL command, by hand, with a piped in user ID.
The notifications team is responsible for sending messages. Why do they care, or should be responsible for, identifying if a user is deleted? They’re responsible for maintaining the SPAM/unsubscribe list but not the user accounts.
it’s distributed decision making, no one cross-cutting or thinking about these edge cases that impact multiple systems
I’ve used
example.comin tests because my understanding is that domain is for examples and tests, and it’s pretty harmless if something accidentally really sends an emailIf I were the NSA running
example.com, I too would say it’s “totally harmless, for realsies, trust us”.It’s the IANA who has it reserved
Yes. Yes. Totally not the NSA.
It’s in the name “I Am Not the American national security agency - IANA”
…and they were roommates…
“I heard Suzanne from HR smokes weed”
