Slashdot Mirror
College Student Receives Email of the Lost
dots and loops wrote to mention an eWeek article that's something of a life lesson: Don't be too smart for your own good. The article tells the tale of a college student who cleverly chose null@vtext.com as his cellphone email address. He's been getting thousands of wayward emails and text messages since 2001. From the article: "Initially, the content of the messages was innocuous, he said. It was things like don't forget to drop the car off at baker's and to call mom at 781-XXX-XXXX, stuff like that, Bubrouski wrote. The problem worsened in mid-2002, when Bubrouski's phone began channeling what he claims were dozens of messages from an e-mail address used by General Motors' then-new "OnStar" system. The messages quickly filled up the memory on his cell phone and contained diagnostic response to tests on a beta version of OnStar. 'Basically, peoples' cars were sending messages to my phone, Bubrouski wrote. "
My freshman year a friend of mine received a few emails for a professor, the best one was an email asking the professor to excuse the sender's daughter from a final because she had a cold.
If he chose this address to receieve the emails will null as sender then he is not very smart. I'm betting he just uses the handle null, and it was just an unfortunate coincedence.
Slashdot just put your email address on their home page. Unscrambled.
Hmmm...wonder what a variant of the Slashdot effect is going to do to a cellphone?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"There's no way that this should be happening. No e-mail system would ever do that," he said.
Verizon should be rejecting messages with improperly formatted addressee information, not forwarding it to an account, he said.
Bubrouski agrees.
"I'd have to say Verizon is at fault. Sure, service providers make mistakes, but Verizon shouldn't be accepting messages from no one to no one," he said.
It's safe to say Verizon is at fault, but perhaps not in the way everyone would think. How could they let someone have an email address of 'null'? NULL is generally a reserved keyword in most places where it is used; apparently the designers of Verizon's email system forgot some basic computing. Could someone sign up for 'root@vtext.com'? I would hope they would be smart about avoiding problems like that in the first place, though in the end it's true that their email system must be pretty poor if it allows messages with malformed header information to be received.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Now he going to get messages sent to null@vtext.com from all of slashdot
I am very sure that also having your email address posted on the front page of Slashdot won't help matters either. This guy doesn't seem too smart.
He though he got a lot of email before. I wonder what happens after his email address is splashed up on /.?
Now that you null@vtext.com address has shown up
on the front page of slashdot...
You haven't seen anything yet.
Change your fucking cellphone e-mail address, genius.
I almost feel bad taking advantage of people who accidently send me these deals by mistake.
Shit is going to hit the fan in 5... 4... 3...
Seriously, letting someone choose "null" is like letting them pick "Administrator" or "HelpDesk". I thought that was Security 101 material?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Some smart *ss decided to get a vanity plate that read "NONE". It seems that whenever a police officer or parking commisionair issued a ticket for a vehicle without a license plate, they would write in "NONE" where it said plate.
Then the clear entering the ticket info, would (of course) enter the same thing into their system.
The result was hundreds of tickets being issued to him, for various offenses (parking, speeding, etc.).
However, I don't understand why he hasnt gotten a new email address, or why Verizon hasnt fixed this problem, because messages should be returned or deleted, not forwarded to some random person.
There was a story in our local paper a while back about someone who had the vehicle vanity tag of "UNKNOWN" and the owner started getting issued all sorts of automated red light camera tickets shortly after the city started installing red light cameras. Turns out the system that would OCR scan the violaters would enter the word UNKNOWN in the license field for the ticket if the car that was photographed running the light was missing its tags or they were otherwise illegible.
Be careful of your chosen names!
Everyone complains about C++ programs "crashing" if you're doing silly things with memory. Why would we want to know about our problems when we can have them buried for us by just defaulting the String to "null" instead?
Poor bastard... but let's face it... he's a bit of a tool :D
This sig used to be really funny...
Must be a joke. It's impossible to register an email as a null character, since most mailservers use nullcharacters internally to sort messages etc.
Not to mention, how will you send a nullcharacter through the signup form, did he use telnet and send the form data that way?
So if you created a user named "All", most messages in echomail and most messages in local boards would be flagged as new to you. Once sysops figured that out they usually created the user All and that was the end of it.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
...but, uh
a college student who cleverly chose null@vtext.com
doesn't sound like there was anything "clever" about it.
That's why we have RFC 2606
http://outcampaign.org/
867-5309 for the number?
In the world of software design, "Null" is commonly used to represent "no value" or "0." Developers of mobile services use the "Null" address during testing routines, assuming that the messages won't be sent to anyone.
I wonder if he even thought about this before he got that address.
Now the question is - can he sue for textual harassment?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
he chose the nick "n","u","l","l". Not "\0".
Sounds like someone screwed up big time. In most (all?) programming languages,
str = "null" and
str = null
mean two completely different things. Somewhere along the line, they must be converting null(value) to "null"(string), which seems like a dumb thing to do.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
..but again let me ask, why do Multi-Million dollar companies fail to have their SMTP servers setup correctly, but lame geeks such as myself and other /. readers have their POSTFIX servers set to deny emails that don't have any TO: or FROM: headers? I mean come on, here's a HOWTO that I worked with that started out in 2001 for hell's sake: Postfix Anti-UCE
Still, there's going to be a ton of companies that don't know what they're doing, or who they're hiring; problems like these will only continue to surface.
fak3r.com
I new they could cause many problems, but receive the wrong email wasn't one of them.
A car owner in California buys a vanity license plate that says NONE. Within a week he's receiving hundreds of parking citations. All the citations have NONE in the license number field because the car had no license plate.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Great!
http://outcampaign.org/
I own the testcluster.com domain.
l uster.com
Until I finally shut off DNS to it, every day or so there would be some Windows Active Directory system out there trying to update my DNS servers. I'm guessing "testcluster" is a popular name for a new Windows clusters.
For example:
query: _ldap._tcp.pdc._msdcs.testcluster.com
query: _kerberos._tcp.dc._msdcs.testcluster.com
query: 6c91d860-bf0b-4bd9-b0f3-2a368934fe0e._msdcs.testc
query: _ldap._tcp.DomainDnsZones.testcluster.com
that when choosing a vanity plate in california decide to enter NOPLATE as his last choice of three. Well that was what we call a "Dumb Idea" as he soon started receiving many, many parking tickets and soon warants for his arrest. Seems that at the time if you illegally parked a car without plates the cops entered NOPLATE on the parking ticket.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
When my school started to offer friendly email address (as opposed to unfriendly uXXXXXXX@nus.edu.sg) you could only sign up for addresses using a combination of your initials and your name. Smartass that I am, I signed up for a@nus.edu.sg.
It's a college, and long story short seems like every few months somebody testing out the new shopping cart or mail server they made, sends me test emails. I've had credit card information more than once. I reply and tell whoever it is that I'm getting the emails, and it stops.
It's a good way to liven up an inbox that usually only gets circulars and spam.
Many years ago, I worked at an ISP where a customer chose "core" for his username. A weekly OS cleanup script kept deleting his mail spool.
Obviously not at the quantity this guy has but I have an common odd user name that I use on yahoo, hotmail, and several other free web mail places. I get tons of email confirmations and passwords for people that setup accounts at places. Just last week was a Myspace account a dude setup trying to get back at his ex girlfriend. Nice pictures but I had hundreds of requests to add people to my friends list because of the content of the pictures that were posted.
I've also had several accounts created with my username from Snapfish and similar photo places. The content is not spectacular but some are interesting.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Slashdot teh cell phone!
All that said, why are the developers of these programs using it? I can only assume it is them sending messages to this address as I doubt any clients would. Whatever happened to sending you email to example@example.com? Even better set up an email account that just dumps into a bit bucket on your domain and use that. Regardless of the method why allow messages that the users are obviously not intending to send to go out at all? Sometimes I wonder how computers can work at all with this many idiots behind the wheel.
Slashdot: Where anecdotes and generalizations can be freely substituted for facts, logic, or intelligence
The security and system admin folk at Verizon goofed. They shoudln't have allowed the use of ``null'' in the first place.
I had a similar problem in college, when as a freshman I felt very lucky to get john@[mycollege].edu as my address. Apparently lots of people think they have "John" as an alias in their address book that will get automatically expanded, and many of them are incorrect in this assumption. A few thousand misaddressed emails later, I didn't feel quite so lucky.
The worst of it was a mailing list that randomly chose my address as the example address for their explanation of how to compose a subscribe message, just as the Net was being flooded with AOLers. You can imagine how many times (per day!) I was subscribed to the list.
The signal to noise ratio will go down, but the quality of the noise will skyrocket.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My vanity license plate is "NONE". I never get any parking tickets.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
I own a domain that is similar enough to an ISP that I get about one errant email a month. I wont change the domain name though for reasons that you wont care about.
Anyway, I have a standard response that I send back to people letting them know that they mistyped the addresses. In about two years of this, only 3 or 4 times has anyone bothered to thank me for letting them know they screwed up.
And one time, some idiot actually replied to my message and kept talking as if he was talking to his friend! Talk about dense.
Great, now its going to be even more difficult to explain to people learning unix what happens to data going to /dev/null
The FA mentions that the subscriber was able to block emails using a blacklist on the vtext.com web site. Unfortunately for those of us who use Verizon, they don't have a companion whitelist capability. I would like to be able to specify who CAN send me text messages, so I don't get /.-ed to the poorhouse.
BTW, those of you who think it would be fun to send this guy texts, please don't. Verizon charges something like a dime a pop for texts. I wouldn't wish that on my enemies or even my freaks.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
I'm constantly editing text my boss writes for publishing on the web that has stuff like "enter your email address (eg: smithj@telus.net)" to say username@example.net.
.net, .edu, and .com are reserved for use in documentation and common system names like Postmaster@, abuse@, root@, etc shall not be used for personal email addresses.
Whoever smithj@telus.net is should be glad.
Remember folks, example.org,
...of a friend of mine who registered billgates.com way back in the day. He set up a website that showed the most recently received emails to the domain. Quite entertaining...a lot of people actually seemed to believe that emailing Bill with your sob story would result in a cash handout. Wacky.
This reminds me of what happened to Steve Wozniak.
Apparently, he always wanted a phone number with all the same digit, like 444-4444. After he got one, he discovered the horrible truth... he got tons of calls followed by hang-ups. As the story goes, he couldn't figure out what it was, until one day he heard someone yell in the background, "Jimmy - you hang that up!" (or something like that). He was getting little kids! Of course, they grab the phone and press the same number over and over.
If you watch TV news, you know less about the world than if you just drank gin straight from the bottle.
I can't help but wonder, though, why a cop would even bother writing a ticket for a car with no plates? How else are they going to know whose car it is?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
going to destroy the planet if it doesn't recieve a response?
What?
I gotta wonder, maybe this story is true, but why would confidential info, like Medical records, credit card numbers, etc, be being sent as clear-text email? I could maybe see SAT scores, but I don't think even that would be.
If anyone I did business with sent me confidential info over email, and it wasn't encrypted, I'd be royally ticked, and sue them for being so negligent about protecting my info.
From the article:
:)
In the world of software design, "Null" is commonly used to represent "no value" or "0."
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!
Null is commonly used to represent "no value" or the absence of data. In programming, zero is discrete and specific data. Zero is data. Null is the lack of any data.
Okay so this isn't exactly a programming or data base design article but these things are important. I work in a support department and do you know how hard it is to explain what NULL is? Misinformation should not be spread to the masses!
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
The cop can also write down the VIN number. It's on the dashboard visible through the windshield. The cop gets points for the number of tickets he/she writes. The tickets are often a necessary precurser to getting the car towed.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
VIN number
I can't help but wonder, though, why a cop would even bother writing a ticket for a car with no plates? How else are they going to know whose car it is?
The vin number, usually visiable on the dashboard unless we are talking something very old. IIRC the tickets reflect the plate if visiable, the vin, and color. And I believe, not having much experence with this, a car if parked on a public street needs to be ticketed to be towed.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I have a Verizon phone and set up an "alias" email address like this for my phone. That's all it is. You can always send email to 1005551212@vtext.com (your phone number, of course), but the alias address can be changed. I started to get some spam on my phone through the alias, so I changed it to something else. It took 15 seconds on their website.
Years of this? Why not just change the address?
same thing happened to me when I registered an "address"@XXXX.com address. all sorts of generic mail.
call mom at 781-XXX-XXXX
My therapist is buying a boat.
Many years ago I worked at a dot com. We needed some bogus email addresses with a valid looking domain name, and the developer working on that project just picked one at random. However, he didn't both to see if the domain name was valid, and a little later we got a call from the owner wondering why our systems were flooding his mail server, trying to send messages to bogus addresses.
It was a stupid mistake, but it looks like one that others have made as well. I would bet the reason he started getting messages from OnStar was simply because developer somewhere needed an email address and didn't bother to check whether or not the address was valid - a stupid mistake. But an honest one.
In the early 90's I wrote email software for a living. When we added SMTP support, I would use "nobody@nowhere.com" as a guaranteed-to-fail address for testing non-delivery reports.
Then, one day, around 1996, I stopped getting non-delivery reports....
I've never had the courage to try and figure out who I dumped 10,000 identical e-mails onto...
Clear, Dark Skies
There was a similar example of bad programming on thedailywtf a few days ago. Check out The Replacement...(and some of the other crazy code samples that they've found).
Yes, surely smithj@telus.net should be glad you so thoughtfully published his email address on slashdot.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
This kid is a friend of mine, I went to Northeastern and took some classes with him. He told me once that he had the vtext address of null. I thought he was joking until he showed me his inbox. He got all kinds of crazy text messages, he said the random messages amused him so he kept the account. Some people are lucky that he's not a bad guy, because he occasionally gets "sensitive" information texted to him. Verizon is dumb as hell for letting somebody use null as a username, and there email system is piss poor if messages with malformed headers are getting though. I'm switching to Cingular this spring, hopefully the username root is still available. Yo Stan if you read this I'll text you when I get out of work, Hopefully you're inbox isn't bursting with SPAM.
Mods: FFS Let's kill another urban legend!
On RISKS, a few years ago, someone wrote up his experiences as"My life as uucp@aol.com". Pretty funny:
Today I received an email from a girl called Neomi Rosina. The subject read: "CHEEAP WAY TO BIGGER UR SHORT & THIN D11CK am".
The body of the email contained the following.
Now THAT's an INBOX that has got to be really stuffed.
We all knew the answer to that.
--- Dan
I never put my personal/business address on a commercial site, unless it's a site I use for my business. Furthermore, I use a white list. Works like a champ.
Well, how nice for you that your life is so simple and your needs are so modest. However, many other people cannot use a white list.
His complaint is legitimate: it is exceptionally rude for Slashdot editors to manually unscramble an E-mail address and put it into a story.
The problem goes deeper than reserved keywords. They apparently didn’t understand the concept of “in-band signaling--the sending of metadata and control information in the same channel used for data,” instead of using separate channels. Using unescaped, reserved keywords in software is one example of this. You should be able to use NULL or PRN or COM1 or whatever you want in the e-mail address instead of telling the user, ”you can’t use this as your e-mail address.”
A better design than using NULL to indicate “pretend like you’re sending this message but don’t actually deliver it” would be to have a separate field in the message header to say the same thing. Then you wouldn’t have to arbitrarily deny the use of certain e-mail addresses just because you designed the system poorly.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
apparently the designers of Verizon's email system forgot some basic computing
Unlike "root" or "postmaster", the address "null" has no special meaning in an E-mail system.
Man... Now she's gonna connect me with all that ancient spam.
Well, at least I didn't mention that I was working for Soft-Switch at the time. She may not connect me with email that came from them....
Clear, Dark Skies
So after reading the article how many of you sent email to his phone? Could this be the first slashdoting of a phone? And does he get charged per message?
Unlike you, the police know about VIN
Why can people be more careful on how they test thier equipment/software?
what's so hard about setting up a simple SMTP server in a seperate lab enviornment,
configuring it to be vtext.com and making sure your software is sending the correctly formated "TO:" fields
sending it off into public networks is just irresponsible.
I'm sure some engineers sent messages purposely to NULL@vtext.com but shouldn't good programers at Verizon check for that?
shouldn't there have been a list of restricted VTEXT alias? so administrator@vtext.com couldn't be registerd?
There is plenty of blame to spread around here.
Bubrouski's phone began channeling
Wow. A cell phone ter'angreal.
... for anon@anon.com, a@anon.com, abc@abc.com, junk@junk.com and host of other imaginary email addresses I've chosen in the past.
Seriously. What I find amusing here is the collection of comments about "stupid kid" and similar. No way. This guy knew what he was doing; he thought it would be quite funny to see what happened - and he was rewarded with years of amusing misdirected messages followed by a flurry of activity on the web. Well done him. Years ago - a secretary in my office "was shocked" to discover that British Airways voicemail could be broken into by using # followed by the PIN 4444 when prompted for options 1-n. The SUN newspaper in the UK carried the story prominently - after we changed the messages. This was brilliant. Just what she was hoping for when she type '#4444'. And similarly - he's got just what he was hoping for. Just think about the email admins in charge of testing.com, test.com and 123.com. They must have a field day.
How about allah@vtext.com?
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
Sounds like you're in there.
I set up an email alias nospam@myuniversity.edu when I was in school. I actually got a few emails to it, but nothing like this guy.
Verizon does not charge the recipient of a text message.
Yes, they do. I'm a Verizon customer. Up until last September, I was charged 1.5c per received message. I used to forward a copy of my personal emails to the phone because it was convenient and, as long as I wasn't forwarding spam, it was cheap. On September 1st, Verizon raised the price to 10c per message received. Naturally, I turned off the forwarding.
There are bundle deals but recieving isn't free with them either. You get a fixed number of messages that you can send or receive.
There's a "Downside School and Abbey" in England. I'd get misaddressed e-mail to and from students and teachers. Most of this was minor, although a few students signed up for things that generated spam, resulting in my getting junk mail about British teen idols. On one occasion, though, I got a misaddressed message headed "I am going to kill you tonight". This was after the Columbine massacre, when everyone was paranoid about school shootings, so I called the school, got someone up in the middle of the night their time, and read them the message. It turned out to be a 12 year old kid flaming in E-mail. But you never know.
Then there was "Downside", the band. They had "downside.net" for a while. That produced some amusing E-mail. I'd get some of their mail, even after filtering. I forwarded this to their lead singer, and we'd occasionally exchange messages. That was fine, but then they tried offering branded e-mail to their fans, using the "downside.net" domain. That led to too much junk, and I talked to them about that. Finally, they were signed by a label, and changed their name to "Strata" to avoid trademark problems, since I own "Downside" as a registered trademark. There are actually several other bands now calling themselves "Downside", but none of them seem to be very active. (The grunge band on Long Island broke up, another let their domain expire, and the third insists they haven't broken up, but don't play much.)
The worst problem was a "joe job", a company sending out spam to advertise their porno sites. At one point, 16,000 mail bounces per day were coming in, and the mail server was overloading. We put some effort into shutting them down. Since they were paying for ISP accounts with credit card numbers they'd collected from their customers, ISPs were very cooperative. And owning a registered trademark gives you extra legal leverage.We got them kicked off servers on three continents. We had their domains locked and their DNS turned off. It took a while to trace them to St. Petersburg, Russia, but after some long international phone calls, all their sites disappeared from the web and were never seen again.
"So these sons-of-bitches send me crap all day. 'My car's broken down. My baby's been eaten by a dingo.' Boo fucking hoo.
I go to the bar at lunch. Have a bottle of the Dago Red and read this drivel. I would smack them if I knew them. A woman approaches. A fan. I take her back to the room and throw a fuck into her while the email inexorably builds up. It's driving me out of my fucking mind.
After I'm finished with her I look at the thing: a thousand messages from the doomed to the lost. I throw it out the window on the way to the track."
Say what you want, and don't admit it, but we are all secretly trying to figure out how to do this with our picture phones so we get topless images of drunk coeds (by mistake) at 3 am.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
If he received SMS messages via Google Send to Phone, Google mightt ophone/faq.html says
... we
have the contents, which could be useful in tracking down why they
occurred. I didn't see anything saying that Verizon stores the
contents of SMS messages, or whether they'd be willing to do this.
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/send
"When you send a message using Google Send to Phone
might also log the text of the message you send, in order to
investigate and correct technical problems with the service."
I imagine most email harvisting software will ignore things like null@ and maybe things like nobody@ or abuse@ in addresses, figuring them to be false results.
A wise person could probably avoid 80% of spam just based on their username. A common username like john, will probably be getting spam before it is created, because spam software will take every reasonable domain name it can and add common names to it.
"Hello?"
"Vroom vroom!"
"Damn!"
*click*
Years ago in college I created a batch file that would flood other students screens with endless DOS windows with stupid messages during class (some Windows feature to send messages across the network, I don't recall the command). People usually surfed the net well the teacher babbled on, so this would really piss them off. The messages would come so fast most students who weren't smart enough to just block me or disconnect from the network would end up shutting off their computers to end the flood.
For shits and giggles I named my computer admin@[network], which turned out to be the same name as the teachers computer in his office. How this was possible, I don't know, bad setup on their part I assume. How I learned that the teachers computer shared the same name? People were sending messages back to me, which were going to the teachers computer instead, with swearing and death threats that I better stop messing up their computers and after a day of batch files calling batch files and a massive flood of many computers the teacher came in and asked why his computer was flooded with these type of messages from so many students.
This was before I logged into everyones computer who didn't set an administrator password, deleted their user account, and changed their admin passwords to, "ilikehairyballsonmyface"
I've used that one a lot.
That gives me bad ideas... O:)
Just like 'cat /dev/null' on a busy multi-user system. Amazing what some people throw away.
(yes, I'm only kidding and no, I know that doesn't work.)
Send flames to /dev/nul ... I mean ... this guy.
Hey, at least he's just "null" and not "nobody", which is a bit more canonical in the Unix world. And he's not Joe, or "joe user" or Alice or Bob (popular with cryptographers and protocol designers) or "user" or "login" or "example".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
"nobody" is a standard user in SunOS and various other Unix flavors, so mail to "nobody@some-machine-running-sunos.domain.com" will generally go to whoever gets "nobody"'s mail, generally root or a large file named [your mail spool here]/nobody . It's not official from an SMTP standards perspective, but it's a more likely target for random mail than "bin", "usr", etc.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There are over 50 DMVs. I'm sure they have better tings to do than sit someone down and come up with every word a police officer might use to indicate that a vehicle's tags are missing. And then still miss some, which at some point would get hit unintentionally.
It's a case of trying to proactively solve the problem is more work than retroactively solving it (from the perspective of the DMV, anyway).
paintball
(Like the guy who got the vanity plate "NO NE" and next year, when he went to renew his registration, got billed for the last year's unpaid parking tickets on every car in the state with a missing license plate.)
..." mesage was actually the explanation about how you're supposed to fill in the user's and site's name rather than make a copy of the mail command in the manual. So this hack provided the message for the entire internet.
The domain node.com had a similar problem.
('scuse me for spacing out the email addresses in this post, but you know bots. I don't want to cause 'em any more trouble.)
Back in the days of home-rolled sendmail configurations, system administrators often thought they knew better than the users (and were often wrong.) One thing that was common was to decide that mail addressed to a user named "user" or a site named "node" was the result of somebody reading the manual too closely and forgetting to substitute the actual user's or site's name in the mail command. And of course mail to "u s e r @ n o d e . c o m" MUST be an error, right? B-) So many of them would "hotwire" their sendmail configuration files to bounce such mail, returning a helpful note about what the manual meant.
But it turns out that "node.com" is a real domain. (A very old one - dating from the days when a list of ALL the domains fit on a three-page appendix to an early book on the internet.) So these bogus sendmail configurations were interfering with its mail something fierce.
In those days the mail was handed around from site to site, too, rather than going straight to the mail server of the target over the "connected intenet". So one "helpful" sendmail configuration file could foul up mail to node.com from great swaths of sites that had no institutional connection with the hotwired one. The automatic routing protocols would find their best route, which often would happen to go through a hotwired mail server. Then a user at node.com would complain, and the sysadmin would have to contact the correspondent getting bounces, hunt down the offending site, figure out how to get in touch with the sysadmin, and talk him into getting things fixed. (Of course this wasn't helped by the sysadmin's own system bouncing his return mail... B-) )
(Of course people with the expertese to attempt such "automated helpfullness" were often running large sites that handled a lot of mail for a lot of other sites, so it only took a few of 'em to bollox things up for much of the net.)
What he eventually did was create the account "user" and configure the "vacation" program. "u s e r @ n o d e . c o m" was ALWAYS on vacation. The "I'm on vacation until
Of course "vacation" records the sender's address and only replies once, thus breaking mail loops. It also squirrels away all the incoming mail for the vactioner's return - creating a record of how often the mistake is made.
Turns out it was not very common at all. "user" got far less than a hundred letters a year. (Or did until some web forms for signing up for mailing lists used "user" and "node.com" for the default fields. And then the account got onto some spam lists.)
By the way: Don't test it by sending mail. It was taken down during the system upgrade for Y2K. By then there were a lot of Mail Transfer Agents other than sendmail, and most sendmail configurations were automatically generated by vendor-supplied tools - which didn't try to hotwire "node.com". So when the system was moved to a non-unix box without a preinstalled "vacation" program there seemed little point in maintaining the "service".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No thanks. I like to be able to find my email.
I just wish I had some mod points to give you for that one, thougn.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I was the SA and mail admin for void.com from about '94-96 (before it was in the hands it presently appears to be in).
There was an amazing amount of bogus email that went to null@void.com - largely from people filling in web forms. It was a huge waste of bandwidth at the time. I can only imagine how much traffic it would generate now.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
The heart of the problem is that when you signed up for plato, the application asked for your MTS id (always 4 letters). Many people who didn't have an account filled in "none". When Plato saw that a print job was finished, it would send an email to the MTS user associated with the print job. I started getting dozens of emails a day telling me that my print jobs were done.
I complained to the plato consultant.
He fixed the problem by setting the account name for all users with no account and then not sending any emails to the user 'none'. Unfortunately, he didn't quite get the second part right. Now I was getting hundreds of unwanted emails (kinda like today, but filtering software didn't exist way back then).
This time I teased the plato consultant
As a quick fix, he just turned off all emails for the plato system... Unfortunately, this was a new hook that he'd just put in, that consisted of setting the notification ID of all users to 'none' just before it went thru the (non-working) filtering code.
Now I was getting about 100 emails an hour (or, at least, it felt like it).
All I had to say to him by this point was "it's getting worse".
He did, finally get it fixed, but there was one last hitch...
All of the unassigned emails had a destination mailbox name of 'none', so we had to train the operators to deliver all plato emails with a destination of 'none' into a designated 'plato' box. Unfortunately, they didn't just put the plato print jobs there. They also put print jobs that were legitimately mine there as well.
It probably took about 2 months to get everything working properly, but it did ultimately settle down.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Hey, you posted.. you should have accepted the risk. Tough luck.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Last I checked VZ is charging me $0.02 per received text message and $0.10 for each I send.
I guess it depends on your plan.
He'd be rich by now!
Well I'm the fool the article is written about and I got and forgot so many its hard to say. Not many of them were entertaining, more informative than anything else. I'd have to say though the wierdest and by far most annoying messages are:
Fr: (null)
(null)
CB#:
That's it. I've been getting them since the beginning, and the time I waste erasing empty messages from nobody always strikes me as odd.
I registered a few years ago an email address of johntory@rogers.com. John Tory was a relatively young lawyer turned executive (for those who know, Rogers Cablesystems is the main cable company in Canada, ran by Ted Rogers, also a lawyer). I registered it because he kept on appearing on TV explaining why Rogers sucks. Anyway, 1-2 years later he ran for mayor in Toronto, and took the second place (first loser). My mailbox got filled with messages from other lawyers and layppl congratulating him for his excellent campaign, even though all Rogers corp emails are in the *@rci.rogers.com namespace. Not long after, my service started to suck, I asked them to disconnect me, they didn't, and eventually I had a collection agency on my a** claiming almost $1000 from me. Typical.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
While I do agree that the people creating the devices that send the emails should be a little more cautious, and I think it is nice that this guy came forward with the information, it seems a little odd that he would have let this go on for 5 years!
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
This reminds me: Long ago, someone at a UNIX user group meeting told us about how he had the email address uucp@aol.com for a while. He said he got some pretty strange email.
Karma: Positive (mostly due to rash moderations)
When signing up to high-risk crap I don't need like NYTimes articles, once-off downloads and the like, when prompted for an email address, I try and use a combination of [root|postmaster|webmaster] @ [localhost|company.domain] and choose as many "Free Newsletters" as I can.
:)
It really gives you that warm, fuzzy, "F@CK YOU!" feeling on the inside
... and then there were none
For many years, I had the screen name "File" on AOL. I don't know where exactly the convention comes from, but apparently, lots of people are used to CCing a copy of their emails to "File" in order to save a local copy. On AOL, the mail system has quasi-LDAP built in; if whatever you place into the CC field is a valid AOL screen name, that screen name becomes a CC recipient. And so, tons of people would try to carbon copy their emails to a local file by typing "File" into the CC field, and it would wind up in my inbox.
I can't begin to describe the various hilarities I witnessed over the years. Wish I still had the screen name; alas, it was hijacked a few years ago when someone called up impersonating me, and all the AOL support fuckwits were willing to do was cancel the account. Their loss.
Random brainfart: file@aol.com posts to Usenet almost 10 years ago. Yikes, I'm feeling old!
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
perhaps you only want certain people that can work out how to fix that minor problem to view your site?
Also, you have spelling mistakes in the Disclaimer of every drug report:
Disclaimer These reports are not necessarily indicative of a problem or new side effect of the durg or drugs listed. This is merely a report of an adverse reaction that may be related to one or more the durgs listed. Before stopping or starting any medication, you should consult with a physcian.
So which part is by mistake, drunk or topless?
(of course if a drunk is trying to operate a cell phone camera at 3AM you may well get an image that is itself topless, not to mention out of focus and upside down)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Can we buy this guy a phone->computer link and post all these messages on the web somewhere?
Yup -- it's funny
Sounds more like the NetWare SEND command. I once did something similar to disrupt an Advanced Netware seminar.
I come here for the love
"I mounted my 60GB hard drive on /dev/null and now it's filled with crud..."