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I've owned a domain for 10+ years that's spelled correctly and is kinda neat and i'll do something with it some day. A few years back a start up got some fundin

I've owned a domain for 10+ years that's spelled correctly and is kinda neat and i'll do something with it some day. A few years back a start up got some funding, tried to buy my domain several times, and ended up going with a variation of the domain, but minus a vowel. eg, if i owned flicker.com, they ended up with flickr.com (it's neither of those domains, BTW). I semi-regularly get support emails for them. If i'm in a good mood and see the email as it comes in, i'll tell them the correct email to use (no one has ever thanked me for that, as it happens). Normally I just ignore them, or don't notice them for a few days. I find it mildly amusing when there's a series of emails from the same person with panic escalating over a few hours. "Where is my project?" "I need this for my report in the morning!" "I'M GOING TO SUE YOU!"

shabble 13y ago
I wonder if you could train a spam classifier to identify & autorespond (or to randomly just drop/bounce/"help"[1] if you want to automate your current workflow :) ) these messages? Maybe even a simple regex for <theirdomain>.tld would work. Probably want to have it after a whitelist-known-contacts step to avoid upside-down-ternetting[2] your friends though. [1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl [2] http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html
- dotmanish 13y ago
  "Maybe even a simple regex for <theirdomain>.tld would work." It won't. They are mailing to hisdomain.tld ; probably support@hisdomain.tld
  - shabble 13y ago
    I meant in the body of the message "I can't log in to my stupid $theirdomain/$theirservice account!"
lostlogin 13y ago
Gawd. I used to have a phone with attached fax that was one digit off a popular fish and chip shop number. I would get advertising faxes at the rate of about 1 roll of fax paper per week from an advertising company. I rung, faxed emailed and tried multiple times to correct them. In the end I got one of their faxes, faxed it back to them, then tapped the bit that came out the fax to the bit still going in. A vicious fax loop. It ran all weekend. I got one grumpy as fax back on Monday about how I'd used up a massive roll of fax paper, and they had been unable to delete the queue for some reason, so it had used up the refills too. $$ Were demanded. The spam faxes stopped and I never heard from them again.
- PakG1 13y ago
  LOL, that reminds me of the time my work number was one digit off from the company switchboard. I worked for a telecom doing .NET stuff. So surprised I am when a mobile phone customer calls me at 2am in a panic that he had lost his phone. Three questions ran through my mind: how did he know I worked for the company, how did he get my personal number, and why did he think I could help him? After a few more instances, I realized these people weren't calling my personal number, they were fat fingering my work number, which was forwarded to my mobile. It was so weird until I figured that out.

shabble 13y ago

I wonder if you could train a spam classifier to identify & autorespond (or to randomly just drop/bounce/"help"[1] if you want to automate your current workflow :) ) these messages? Maybe even a simple regex for <theirdomain>.tld would work. Probably want to have it after a whitelist-known-contacts step to avoid upside-down-ternetting[2] your friends though. [1] http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/bofhserver.pl [2] http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

dotmanish 13y ago
"Maybe even a simple regex for <theirdomain>.tld would work." It won't. They are mailing to hisdomain.tld ; probably support@hisdomain.tld
- shabble 13y ago
  I meant in the body of the message "I can't log in to my stupid $theirdomain/$theirservice account!"

lostlogin 13y ago

Gawd. I used to have a phone with attached fax that was one digit off a popular fish and chip shop number. I would get advertising faxes at the rate of about 1 roll of fax paper per week from an advertising company. I rung, faxed emailed and tried multiple times to correct them. In the end I got one of their faxes, faxed it back to them, then tapped the bit that came out the fax to the bit still going in. A vicious fax loop. It ran all weekend. I got one grumpy as fax back on Monday about how I'd used up a massive roll of fax paper, and they had been unable to delete the queue for some reason, so it had used up the refills too. $$ Were demanded. The spam faxes stopped and I never heard from them again.

PakG1 13y ago
LOL, that reminds me of the time my work number was one digit off from the company switchboard. I worked for a telecom doing .NET stuff. So surprised I am when a mobile phone customer calls me at 2am in a panic that he had lost his phone. Three questions ran through my mind: how did he know I worked for the company, how did he get my personal number, and why did he think I could help him? After a few more instances, I realized these people weren't calling my personal number, they were fat fingering my work number, which was forwarded to my mobile. It was so weird until I figured that out.