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These types of addresses are actually used by corporate anti-spam software and they are called "honeypots". The idea being you setup a inbox with no public emai
by legitster 4y ago
These types of addresses are actually used by corporate anti-spam software and they are called "honeypots". The idea being you setup a inbox with no public email address and report any IP Addresses sending it emails. There is no legitimate reason someone should be emailing these addresses, so it's an obvious flag that someone is being naughty.
- iamacyborg 4y agoThere are plenty of legit reasons to be mailing some of those addresses.
- ithinkso 4y agoThere were*
- iamacyborg 4y agoNo, there are. I still see masses of businesses signing up for b2b products using contact@ or info@ addresses.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoIndeed. Lots of businesses rely on such email addresses in their day-to-day work.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoAs much as I hate it one company I work with has not just a functional info@ adress, but it is the main adress they interact with everyone. Just works.
- NullPrefix 4y ago
- thallium205 4y agoDon't sites still use these emails to verify domain ownership?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rascul 4y agohttps://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2142 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2142
- legitster 4y ago> SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS > Denial of service attacks (flooding a mailbox with junk) will be easier after this document becomes a standard, since more systems will support the same set of mailbox names.
- autoexec 4y agoI've managed a number of RFC 2142 mailboxes and while they all got spam (the dumb spammers would even send to abuse@!) it wasn't any worse than the other published email addresses on those systems and the volume was spam was still less than what our typical user would see (since nobody using postmaster@ used it to sign up for everything under the sun). The spam we got was often useful for abuse handling and spam filtering too. It was a good thing! Every network should have an abuse@ address. Web forms are pretty popular these days too, but every extra hoop you force reporters to jump through can cut down on the reports you get of problems on your network. It's worth dealing with the spam to make sure you're getting notified as quickly as possible.
- denton-scratch 4y agoThose addresses are role addresses; depending on what services you are providing, you should have have those addresses, and you should read them. They are often aliased to root@. They are not called "honeypots". A honeypot is an email address that should never get email, typically because the only way a spammer can capture the address is by scraping a web-page. Role addresses don't need to be scraped; they're well-known.