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foo@bar.com is a real email address
- dkl 15y agoI have a domain which is much the same, though I don't get nearly the volume bar.com does. And, I now feel guilty for having used foo@bar.com a few times in the past. Mea culpa!
- rmoriz 15y agosame here at asdas.net
- christoph 15y agoReminds me of: http://test.com/contact/contact_spam.htm http://test.com/contact/contact_spam.htm I dread to think how many emails they get everyday. As a side note, looks like they copied HN's favicon.
- mmastrac 15y agoThe favicon issue is actually a Chrome bug. Sites that don't provide a favicon will sometimes end up with the favicon of the referrer.
- christoph 15y agoIt's not identical, just looks like the same orange with a single white letter in the middle, only noticed when clicking between the two just how similar they were. Wasn't aware of the Chrome bug though, thanks.
- gavingmiller 15y agoAt the same time they likely have a couple of extra inbound links. :D
- iamichi 15y agoThey should just use Postini and let Google handle it. Really impressive service that.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- nirvana 15y agoFor future reference, the example.com domain is maintained for the purpose of documentation, etc. Thus foo@example.com might be a better address to use, especially in examples.
- lanstein 15y ago.com, .net, and .org are all reserved for this purpose.
- shaggyfrog 15y agoJust to add a source, it's all in RFC 2606 section 3: http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt
- mrspandex 15y agoI'd think you'd have to expect this when you set up that email account. (Also, it wasn't enough to spam them, now we DDoS them)
- ImprovedSilence 15y agoyeah, but it looks like he set it up waaaaaaaaaaaay back (like before the eternal September) solely in order to get a rise out of emailing people back. Then the internet blew up and broke his email.
- WalterGR 15y agoFirst we spammed them, and now we appear to be DDoSing them.
- dendory 15y agoSee it boggles my mind how a site cannot survive a front page HN appearance. TideArt has been on the front page a number of times, sometimes even second top link, and I happen to know this brings around 10,000 more hits. Using my own custom CMS, built on SQLite, I handle that kind of traffic easily on a shared host. HN will never bring you more than a few hits per second at the most..
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- old-gregg 15y agoThat is so true... Most developers who get an account with Mailgun (http://mailgun.net http://mailgun.net) get so excited about the live email log or for some other reason... they love to fire up emails to @test.com. We have thousands of emails in our queue destined for test.com at any given moment. Guys, please stop: what makes you think test.com can't be a real destination? :-) Actually, they don't have a mail server for that domain, but still...
- robterrell 15y agoIronically, I just came across some potentially real email addresses in the Mailgun docs and sample code, i.e.: http://cl.ly/1L1C0O2A081x000t382z http://cl.ly/1L1C0O2A081x000t382z You might want to edit those.
- old-gregg 15y agoWe own profista.com and use it for testing ourselves. Using it in the docs helps us see how many people are trying out the samples. I wish all our users would read the docs as carefully as you do! :)
- gsiener 15y agoWould love to read a post about how you measure sample engagement through this and other cleverness!
- troethom 15y agoYou should probably set the example by avoid using "@farfaraway.uk" in your blog posts. It's invalid right now, but that could change too... ;-)
- pyre 15y agoSome should setup a MX on test.com and: * post a public webpage with all email going to @test.com * post a public webpage with all email addresses harvested from emails to @test.com Or * setup an auto responder asking people to stop sending there (bonus points: threaten to post emails of repeat offenders to spammer lists)
- TeHCrAzY 15y agoWork proxy killed the page, with "Block Access\Standard Users\Blocked URLs\Block - Harmful & Stealth". The thing is an overly sensitive, badly configured setup; but still troublesome?
- mcauser 15y agoI frequently use aa@aa.aa - last time I checked, there were no countries using .aa
- seanp2k2 15y agoTo you and everyone using things != .+@example.com: why? Example.(com|net|org) were specifically created for this purpose and for the purpose of tutorials. I work in client-facing support, and it's very easy to troubleshoot software that /other people/ write when the client says something along the lines of "It says 'connection to example.com:25 failed'" -- I instantly know what the problem is. If you're using things other than example.(com|net|org) for this, you're possibly making the job of a support tech you'll never meet harder. If your excuse is "I didn't know about example.com!"...well, that's a lame non-excuse. Do the rest of the IT world a favor and fix your tutorials and software -- mail server administrators like me already have enough headaches from the gazillions of spam techniques in use today.
- danssig 15y ago>well, that's a lame non-excuse. Ignorance is a legitimate excuse. I'm getting sick of people spreading this moronic misunderstanding that ignorance is not an excuse. Just recently the police in NYC failed to follow a judge's order out of ignorance. I wonder what excuse they used. As for why people don't use example.com, if you're signing up for a site that annoyingly makes you put in a password it will check for non-real email addresses so example.com is out.
- vog 15y agoI thought this is basic knowledge of everyone technically engaged in Internet stuff. But apparently, this isn't the case, despite its well-known and very readable documentation! [1] It says: 1) There are exactly 3 domains the IANA keeps free for that purpose: example.com example.net example.org 2) In addition, all domains under the following 3 top level domains can be used freely for that purpose: *.test *.example *.invalid 3) The domains under the following top level domain have some special meaning (should point to loopback IPs only): *.localhost Everything else is either registered, or might be registered by somebody in the future. Don't (mis)use those names unless you own them! Unfortunately, this kind of criticism is not always welcome on HN. (for example, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129459 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129459 was scored -1) [1] RFC 2606, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2606
- RandallBrown 15y agoexample.com is too long. That's why everyone uses foo@bar.com or something shorter.
- vog 15y agoAlthough this argument about shortness doesn't make any sense to me, what about foo@b.test which conforms to the standard and is even shorter?
- modeless 15y ago.test, not being widely used, is not immediately recognizable as a TLD the way .com is.
- binarycrusader 15y ago"too long"? Are you joking? Anyone when educated about the proper use that says that is just spouting BS. Do it right or don't do it all.
- TeMPOraL 15y agoThanks for the explanation and for pointing to RFC. I somehow managed to survive to this date without knowing any of this.
- earl 15y agoI now feel really really bad for fuck@off.com. I owe someone an apology...
- icebraining 15y agoYou're fine, off.com doesn't have MX records.
- holdenk 15y agoExcept some people fall back to the A record (see RFC 5321).
- seanp2k2 15y agoCan you please let me know where you're seeing this? I looked through http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321 for /\sa\s/i and /(fall(\s)?back)/i and didn't find anything related to this this behaviour. I ask because I'd like to have my answer at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8221381/where-does-email-sent-to-example-com-go/8221408#8221408 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8221381/where-does-email-... be as accurate as possible (plus I'm now curious about this). Thanks!
- there 15y agoit's not a fallback, it's the default behavior. originally when you would send mail to a user at a host, the MTA would just connect to that host on port 25. the original SMTP RFC (821) pre-dates any DNS RFCs, so originally there wasn't even a concept of MX records and you just e-mailed someone at the server they had an account on. after DNS was in place, MX records came along in order to route mail destined for a host to a different server, or just supply a list of backup servers. now since most people just use email addresses containing only a domain, MX records are pretty much common place (since the A record of many domains resolves to the web server). now MTAs check for MX records before trying to connect directly to the host. to demonstrate: jcs@thalamus:~> host -t mx test.jcs.org test.jcs.org has no MX record jcs@thalamus:~> host test.jcs.org test.jcs.org has address 10.10.10.10 jcs@thalamus:~> echo test | mail test@test.jcs.org and shortly after, in postfix's mail log: Nov 21 22:59:18 thalamus postfix/smtp[23742]: connect to test.jcs.org[10.10.10.10]:25: Operation timed out
- smokinn 15y agoInteresting that this guy could write a quick script that could take out almost any mail server on the web for more or less free. I imagine only a few of the big guys (yahoo, microsoft, google) could handle large unexpected volumes without hiccup.
- bingaling 15y agoAs is jklsemicolon@asdf.com: http://www.asdf.com/asdfemail.html http://www.asdf.com/asdfemail.html
- squeed 15y agoSome folks registered asdf.com, and had a similar experience. I wish they posted their inbox for all to see. (http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html http://asdf.com/asdfemail.html)
- funkah 15y agoI've never been a fan of foo and bar as example names. Particularly in code examples, I can never keep them straight because the names are meaningless. Anyway, we already have example.com for this purpose.
- kmort 15y agoTo be fair, their meaningless is their value. Using "real world" names may distract from the logic being discussed or unreasonably suggest that the logic may fit only a particular scenario. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable
- 18pfsmt 15y agoPerhaps reading RFC 3092 - Etymology of "Foo"[1] might be helpful. Personally, I was familiar with the acronym FUBAR first, so it comes as natural to me as most mainstream, American acronyms. [1]http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3092.html
- dredmorbius 15y agohttp://bar.com.nyud.net:8080/ http://bar.com.nyud.net:8080/ should bring up the coral cache, if/when anyone can actually get through to the origin URI.
- dsears 15y agoI used to work for a company that hosted customer.com. Microsoft, on more than one occasion, sent thousands and thousands of emails to customer@customer.com.
- aaronmorey 15y agoOne developer probably entered customer@customer.com in a database, and then another guy probably accidentally triggered the "email everybody in the database" script. I can see how that would happen. I've obviously never personally done anything like that but I know a guy who tripped the "Send sales report to CFO" using test data once when I was an intern.
- jackgavigan 15y agoSo is sp@rtacus.com
- mirkules 15y agoIf you really need to receive a test email, you can always use @mailinator.com (just make sure it's not sensitive info). Mailinator is a disposable, publicly viewable email address mostly useful for one-time account registrations, especially in cases where you fear they might spam you. In recent years, I started using the + notation at gmail -- anything you put after the + and before the @ is ignored by gmail, BUT you still receive it -- the handy part is you can filter it out (e.g. myname+hackernews@gmail.com will go to myname@gmail.com, and I create a filter to archive everything that comes to myname+hackernews@gmail.com)
- icebraining 15y agoI prefer to have my own domain, I just use nameofthesite@example.com, and set it up to catch-all.
- a_m0d 15y agoThe "+" trick is great, except for sites that use hair-brained email "validation" scripts which reject the address. Sadly enough, these are often the ones that I most want to use the "+" for (its a great way to also keep track of who hands out your email address to spammers).
- Kevindish 15y agoI have the solution for you there: If your email is mylittlepony@gmail.com Then your can use as many '.' and filter it out. You will also receive emails sendt too my.little.pony@gmail.com M.y.l.i.t.t.l.e.p.o.n.y@gmail.com Gmail ignores punktum. Thats smart!
- mirkules 15y agoHuh. I didn't know about the punctuation marks. That IS smart. Thanks!
- mtrimpe 15y agoMy usual address for this kind of thing is john@doe.com. I've always wondered who would get those emails...
- taf2 15y agoThat fuckers getting a lot of emails!
- danssig 15y agofucker's (fucker is)
- bhuga 15y agoA related topic that drives me nuts after years of operations is the fairly widespread use of '.int' to represent private DNS on an internal network. '.int' is a rarely used TLD for international organizations created by treaty. It is so rare that many browsers do not recognize it as such and will ship you off to a search for 'www.nato.int', for example. Nonetheless, it drives me batty whenever I see 'dns1.int'.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoWorse yet, some internal networks use .local, despite its standard use for mDNS.
- illumin8 15y agoI truly feel sorry for the poor guy that owns asdf@asdf.com. I must have registered for over a hundred different accounts on various Interweb forums using his email address...
- sirclueless 15y agoHe mentions that his real email is jklsemicolon@asdf.com. Which is just as funny, and not as prone to cheap viagra offers, presumably.
- elliottcarlson 15y agoThis page is a memorial to Foo at Bar.com Back in the earliest of early days, I (The Foo at bar.com) got a few emails a week, mostly from sysadmin type people who were invoking The Foo in an effort to debug some kind of system or other. Of course I, being a gregarious sort, answered the messages. Mostly along the lines of "hello? Foo here. What can I do for you?Ó or "who you? I Foo.Ó I met a lot of really interesting people in 1994 and 1995 that way. But soon I had to return to obscurity, as my email volume grew overwhelming. Y'see people building web sites started putting little "give us your email address and we'll let you see the goodies" challenges in their web sites, and lots of folks entered foo@bar.com. Soon, I was getting thousands, then tens of thousands of emails a day, mostly from people who didn't care whether I replied or not. Alas, I was overwhelmed and had to return to my solitary life. For a while, I MX'd email addressed to me to 127.0.0.1 but that made some people cranky (although I still take some quiet pleasure at the thought of what that address did to spammers). I MX'd the mail over to a friend's spam-detection server for about 4 hours one time, but the volume crashed his server and he asked for relief. So now I'm content to tell you this small story. Onward, The Foo
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- veyron 15y agobar.com seems inaccessible. Can someone who saw the site in the past few hours confirm that http://web.archive.org/web/20110707211652/http://bar.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110707211652/http://bar.com/ is up to date?
- pitdesi 15y agoWe get a lot of crap email address signups at http://feefighters.com http://feefighters.com We do a little bit of filtering to check that the email address is legit, but let you get by anyway (with an additional click) if it isn't... we have a 1-click unsubscribe but this is making me rethink whether we should let fake email addresses through at all. We recently got this email from Fake.com Hello We own the domain fake.com, and from time to time some moron out there in the world-wide-waste-of-time uses our name to try and sign up for something... Not just that, there’s also a whole slew of dozy IT people who test links by doing the same thing without doing a whois check first! Whichever it is, could you please delete this account? Thanks [redacted] fake landscapes - the artificial plant company http://www.fake.com* http://www.fake.com* Somehow I don't think this has the desired effect... that's a tough domain name for this sort of thing, feel sorry for the guy but not much we can do.
- bretthoerner 15y agoThe only reason they'd notice & care is because they received email they didn't want, right? I assume you have an obvious 1-click subscribe on all of your emails? If not, I'd gladly mark you as spam over, and over, and over...
- MichaelApproved 15y agoThey must be using a catch-all address otherwise most emails wouldn't exist and bounce without much notice.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago> this is making me rethink whether we should let fake email addresses through at all. How do you tell fake from real? What if someone who works at fake.com wants an account?
- logn 15y agosince the site is dos'd: http://web.archive.org/web/20110707211652/http://bar.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110707211652/http://bar.com/
- brandonhall 15y agoHaha, that's why I always use a dummy email addy at our own domain and make sure all unrouted mail bounces.
- digitist 15y agowhy is this interesting?
- user24 15y agoI can only imagine the volume this guy gets - I have user24@gmail.com and I get about an email a week signing me up for something or other. It's very annoying. So if anyone's reading this: Please stop using random gmail accounts and use foo@bar.com instead. Thanks! * just kidding, test@example.com would be the one to go for ;)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- cjoh 15y agoHow much do you think Bar.com is worth? Seems like a domain that'd sell for a pretty penny.
- RobLach 15y agoNot related but bar.com being a wordpress blog is surprising.