7 ms·

I have had a similar problem for about two decades now in regards to eCards (virtual greeting cards). I own youknowwhat.com and one of my email addresses is you

I have had a similar problem for about two decades now in regards to eCards (virtual greeting cards). I own youknowwhat.com and one of my email addresses is youknowwho@youknowwhat... Turns out that thousands of people every year think they are being super clever by putting my email address in the "From" field. So of course I get zillions of "receipts" for these eCards. "Sister, I hope you feel better soon" ...is the most popular by far. I stopped looking at them years ago but there's often some very personal information included and if I were an evil supervillain it would be trivial for me to use a lot of these eCards to blackmail people! Fortunately for these people there's a highly ethical person at the helm of that email address that filters them all right into the trash.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago
Those e-card providers should of course do some rudimentary sender e-mail verification.
- riskable 10y ago
  I get loads of verification emails too. eCard sites don't usually require email validation but that doesn't stop them from trying!
guitarbill 10y ago
Or you could write a bot that auto-publishes parts of the eCard emails you get to e.g. twitter. Would be interesting for the rest of us :)
city41 10y ago
Sounds similar to the problems test.com endures. http://contactx.test.com/contactX/contact-spam.cfm http://contactx.test.com/contactX/contact-spam.cfm
- Xylakant 10y ago
  It's a surprisingly hard task to educate developers and testers to use the designated test domains (example.com and example.org) in automated or manual tests.
  - IshKebab 10y ago
    Surely example.com has these problems too, although to be fair they don't really need to receive any email.
    - js2 10y ago
      example.com does not receive e-mail. It is specifically set aside (along with example.{net,org} and a few TLDs) for testing: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
    - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
      example.com has an empty MX record, so you can't really send email to it anyway.
      - teddyh 10y ago
        “Empty”? It does not have an MX record.
        0xcde4c3db 10y ago
        You're right; I must have misread the dig output. I thought it showed an MX record with no hostname, but that was probably the question section.
      - 0x0 10y ago
        I believe SMTP attempts delivery to the A record if there is no MX record.
        Xylakant 10y ago
- C4K3 10y ago
  Interesting they don't seem to have SPF/DMARC configured properly. That would probably get rid of most spam, at least at major providers. After setting up a DMARC reporting address for my own domain I was surprised at the amount of emails supposedly from my addresses that are getting rejected, mostly by gmail and yahoo.
tracker1 10y ago
The worst for me, is when I get account creation notifications for a given site, and can't even contact anyone to correct it, etc... For a few months, I was getting student loan account notices for someone else, but not enough PII to actually contact them, and layers of crap and people unable to fix it contacting the company in question. I'm not getting rid of my gmail address... mine ... though I do have another address I use, and may start using that one more once I move the email hosting (on my todo list for over a year).
- koolba 10y ago
  Kind of a pain in the ass to do retroactively, but one approach to prevent this to have your email address be random gibberish. Whereas "firstname.lastname@example.com" (or more likely gmail.com) can be arrived at by multiple people named "Firstname Lastname", you don't have to worry about it if your email address is generated via: echo "$(< /dev/urandom tr -dc a-z0-9 | head -c 12)@example.com"
  - nucleardog 10y ago
    Yes, then every time I need to give someone my email in person or over the phone I just need to say "it's two zed six bee oh, sorry, zero, you ess eight see why you are at example dot com". And then they're going to read it back to me and pretty much invariably have something incorrect. And then I'll have to read it to them again. You'd be better off taking an "xkcd" or "gfycat" approach and making your e-mail "correcthorsebattery@example.com" or "ableorganicanchovy@example.com".
    - koolba 10y ago
      How often are you verbally giving your email over the phone that this an issue? Unless you're ordering daily from the Home Shopping Network and want to get an email receipt, what's the big deal? In my experience either I'm entering my email in a web page form or texting it to the other person.
- daxelrod 10y ago
  I've had that experience tons of times, where companies are happy to unsubscribe me if I just give them the account number that I don't have because I'm not their customer. On the other hand, I was getting Allstate billing notices for someone else and I was surprised how well they handled it. When I called, they understood that I was a third party and apologized. They were able to look at a record of all the email sent and verify I had not received any sensitive information (only last 4 digits of account number, first name, and bill total). They removed my email address and said they would contact their customer immediately. The only way they could have handled it better would have been following best practices and sending a verification link as their first email. :)
freehunter 10y ago
I get something similar. I was an early adopter of a popular email service, so I managed to get <firstname><lastname>@<emailservice>.com. Pretty neat, pretty simple, right? Except I have a really common name, and people seem think that if the email address has their name in it, it must be their email address. I get sign-ups for Facebook all the time. I get emails about credit scores that make me panic until I realize I didn't sign up for that service. The other day I got an appointment reminder to take my Vauxhall into the shop for service (I live in the US, we don't have Vauxhall here). Email is hard and confusing for a lot of people. It's easy for us to forget that.
- theOnliest 10y ago
  I have a very uncommon name (3 of us in the country, as far as I can tell), and this happened to me for the first time this weekend. Someone bought a stereo at Best Buy 500 miles from me and gave them my email (<firstname><lastname>@gmail.com) for the Geek Squad protection plan. I thought someone had stolen my credit card until I realized what happened.
  - nashashmi 10y ago
    Someone signed up with my email address on to hotmail and then a couple of months later hit "forgotpassword", attempted changing the password multiple times, then got in and changed the email address. I got so sick and worried that I got hacked. Turns out they selected the wrong email address when signing for hotmail, and then changed the address to the correct one. it threw me in circles.
  - magnet_ball 10y ago
    I have something of a young name which is also uncommon, not many people over 30 with it, when I was young I googled my full name and got only one result, today when I google myself I find a ton of people who are usually my age or younger. There aren't a lot of people who are using my email, one is an older folk who uses it, and I always mean to contact him, and one was a DJ which accidentally used my email address instead of his.
- ghaff 10y ago
LeoPanthera 10y ago
I have a very similar problem! I own a very short domain name, with letters that appear exclusively on the home row of the US layout keyboard. It accepts emails at the wildcard address, *@<my domain>, so I get a looooot of email from people signing up to services by hammering the home row of their keyboard randomly, with a dot in the middle.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago

Those e-card providers should of course do some rudimentary sender e-mail verification.

riskable 10y ago
I get loads of verification emails too. eCard sites don't usually require email validation but that doesn't stop them from trying!

guitarbill 10y ago

Or you could write a bot that auto-publishes parts of the eCard emails you get to e.g. twitter. Would be interesting for the rest of us :)

city41 10y ago

Sounds similar to the problems test.com endures. http://contactx.test.com/contactX/contact-spam.cfm http://contactx.test.com/contactX/contact-spam.cfm

Xylakant 10y ago
It's a surprisingly hard task to educate developers and testers to use the designated test domains (example.com and example.org) in automated or manual tests.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Surely example.com has these problems too, although to be fair they don't really need to receive any email.
  - js2 10y ago
    example.com does not receive e-mail. It is specifically set aside (along with example.{net,org} and a few TLDs) for testing: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    example.com has an empty MX record, so you can't really send email to it anyway.
    - teddyh 10y ago
      “Empty”? It does not have an MX record.
      - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
        You're right; I must have misread the dig output. I thought it showed an MX record with no hostname, but that was probably the question section.
    - 0x0 10y ago
      I believe SMTP attempts delivery to the A record if there is no MX record.
      - Xylakant 10y ago
C4K3 10y ago
Interesting they don't seem to have SPF/DMARC configured properly. That would probably get rid of most spam, at least at major providers. After setting up a DMARC reporting address for my own domain I was surprised at the amount of emails supposedly from my addresses that are getting rejected, mostly by gmail and yahoo.

tracker1 10y ago

The worst for me, is when I get account creation notifications for a given site, and can't even contact anyone to correct it, etc... For a few months, I was getting student loan account notices for someone else, but not enough PII to actually contact them, and layers of crap and people unable to fix it contacting the company in question. I'm not getting rid of my gmail address... mine ... though I do have another address I use, and may start using that one more once I move the email hosting (on my todo list for over a year).

koolba 10y ago
Kind of a pain in the ass to do retroactively, but one approach to prevent this to have your email address be random gibberish. Whereas "firstname.lastname@example.com" (or more likely gmail.com) can be arrived at by multiple people named "Firstname Lastname", you don't have to worry about it if your email address is generated via: echo "$(< /dev/urandom tr -dc a-z0-9 | head -c 12)@example.com"
- nucleardog 10y ago
  Yes, then every time I need to give someone my email in person or over the phone I just need to say "it's two zed six bee oh, sorry, zero, you ess eight see why you are at example dot com". And then they're going to read it back to me and pretty much invariably have something incorrect. And then I'll have to read it to them again. You'd be better off taking an "xkcd" or "gfycat" approach and making your e-mail "correcthorsebattery@example.com" or "ableorganicanchovy@example.com".
  - koolba 10y ago
    How often are you verbally giving your email over the phone that this an issue? Unless you're ordering daily from the Home Shopping Network and want to get an email receipt, what's the big deal? In my experience either I'm entering my email in a web page form or texting it to the other person.
daxelrod 10y ago
I've had that experience tons of times, where companies are happy to unsubscribe me if I just give them the account number that I don't have because I'm not their customer. On the other hand, I was getting Allstate billing notices for someone else and I was surprised how well they handled it. When I called, they understood that I was a third party and apologized. They were able to look at a record of all the email sent and verify I had not received any sensitive information (only last 4 digits of account number, first name, and bill total). They removed my email address and said they would contact their customer immediately. The only way they could have handled it better would have been following best practices and sending a verification link as their first email. :)

freehunter 10y ago

I get something similar. I was an early adopter of a popular email service, so I managed to get <firstname><lastname>@<emailservice>.com. Pretty neat, pretty simple, right? Except I have a really common name, and people seem think that if the email address has their name in it, it must be their email address. I get sign-ups for Facebook all the time. I get emails about credit scores that make me panic until I realize I didn't sign up for that service. The other day I got an appointment reminder to take my Vauxhall into the shop for service (I live in the US, we don't have Vauxhall here). Email is hard and confusing for a lot of people. It's easy for us to forget that.

theOnliest 10y ago
I have a very uncommon name (3 of us in the country, as far as I can tell), and this happened to me for the first time this weekend. Someone bought a stereo at Best Buy 500 miles from me and gave them my email (<firstname><lastname>@gmail.com) for the Geek Squad protection plan. I thought someone had stolen my credit card until I realized what happened.
- nashashmi 10y ago
  Someone signed up with my email address on to hotmail and then a couple of months later hit "forgotpassword", attempted changing the password multiple times, then got in and changed the email address. I got so sick and worried that I got hacked. Turns out they selected the wrong email address when signing for hotmail, and then changed the address to the correct one. it threw me in circles.
- magnet_ball 10y ago
  I have something of a young name which is also uncommon, not many people over 30 with it, when I was young I googled my full name and got only one result, today when I google myself I find a ton of people who are usually my age or younger. There aren't a lot of people who are using my email, one is an older folk who uses it, and I always mean to contact him, and one was a DJ which accidentally used my email address instead of his.
ghaff 10y ago

LeoPanthera 10y ago

I have a very similar problem! I own a very short domain name, with letters that appear exclusively on the home row of the US layout keyboard. It accepts emails at the wildcard address, *@<my domain>, so I get a looooot of email from people signing up to services by hammering the home row of their keyboard randomly, with a dot in the middle.