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. "

Comments

Fault

[Billosaur]

SMS users, like e-mail users, rely on the fact that carriers like Verizon won't accidentally deliver improperly formatted messages, such as those with no addressee, to an unrelated address, said John Pescatore, a vice president at Gartner.

"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.

Re:You think it's bad *now*

[ElleyKitten]

Verizon does not charge the recipient of a text message.

That explains why he kept the account for 5 years.