Slashdot Mirror
Where Do Dummy Email Addresses Go?
ajain writes "Maybe a year and a half back or so, I started using someone@somewhere.com as a dummy email id in online blogs, guestboks, forums, and sundry pages. But then I started wondering what if someone actually tried to email me on that email address. I was sure that it would bounce because I assumed that there wouldn't be an actual email address like that. In any case, just for fun, I decided to google on someone@somewhere.com. And lo behold, there are some 4090 results! I have written a small article at my blog and a reader says NoOne@NoWhere.com is another contender. Do you use some common dummy email IDs too, to get around the privacy problem online? Isn't there a potential for malicious misuse of someone's email ID in this way?"
Once Upon A Time, a friend of mine had a domain that spelled a major ISPs name backwards (he registered it on purpose, and joked that he was the "anti-big vendor" and gave shell accounts to friends, friends of friends, etc.
Then, someone started posting to usenet a lot, who was a customer of Big Vendor , and he 'spam-proofed' his address by ever so cleverly spelling it backwards.
Suddenly dozens if not hundreds of undeliverable messages started landing on Mike's server for some clown over at ReallyBigISP.
So, like any good sysadmin, he corrected this oversight, adding a sendmail rule to deliver mail for jrluser@psigib.com to jrluser@bigisp.com.
The moral of the story: Do not create harm for some innocent third party with your spam evasion techniques. It may come back to haunt you.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
Even better, don't use a fake email. I use me@privacy.net. If you send mail there, you get an auto-reply that says the submitter likes their privacy and you generally suck for being an email harvester. Go ahead, send me@privacy.net an email and see what I mean...
uce@ftc.gov is my favorite when someone with no legitimate use for my email is requesting it. If that won't take, next in line are postmaster@site.com, webmaster@site.com and root@site.com - where site.com is whatever site is demanding my email. After that comes abuse@aol.com, abuse@hotmail.com and abuse@earthlink.net. I don't expect AOL or any of the other big ISPs to do anything, but on the off chance they do, it means a site that's trying to abuse my email will run afowl of someone who can cut them off from a large number of customer/victims.
hmmmm...all this bandwidth being wasted.
I feel it's my duty to the internet to point these clowns to h4wh4w@127.0.0.1.
You'd be suprised how many sites will actually allow this, since the regular expressions that check them usually allow for identifier@sub.dns.com.country, with each allowing [a-zA-Z0-9].
Funny, I didn't know "email address" was synonymous with "identity."
When somebody asks for your email address, they're asking for a way to contact you--like a phone number. They're not asking for you to uniquely identify yourself as you would with a driver's license or passport, they're only asking how they can reach you.
Email is not identity, and using a dummy email address is not illegal.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.