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

You think it's bad *now*

[Weaselmancer]

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?

Re:You think it's bad *now*

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Slashdot just put your email address on their home page. Unscrambled.

This is actually quite serious. I have had one story posted on Slashdot, and because I didn't have a homepage, the editors put in my unscrambled email address. The story was copied and pasted verbatum by countless sites all over the next.

That address was almost rendered unusable. Only the bayesian span fliters in thunderbird salvaged it. Still, it was pretty irritating to see an address I had been quite careful with destroyed because the Slashdot editors didn't consider carefully what they were doing.

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.

Re:You think it's bad *now*

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Negative. The email address I entered was garbled. The editors degarbled it.

Re:You think it's bad *now*

[Animaether]

I don't know why people bother with these 'obfuscation' / garble techniques on Slashdot comment threads. I wrote a mIRC script that unscrambles practically all of them with ease. The only ones it doesn't are the ones the user scrambled themselves - but all the automated slashdot stuff is a piece of cake.
If I can do it with a mIRC script, you bet an e-mail harvest is already doing it with a more dedicated tool.

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.

He could have chosen "None"

[waterford0069]

This storey reminds me of one I heard about in the 1980's.

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.).

I wonder if he chose

[n0dna]

867-5309 for the number?

car spam

[digitaldc]

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?

*ahem*

[Spy der Mann]

he chose the nick "n","u","l","l". Not "\0".

Another good username

[chowbok]

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.

which reminds me

[temojen]

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.

Whoever smithj@telus.net is should be glad.

Remember folks, example.org, .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.

Re:Here's an idea:

[TubeSteak]

You're not new here, but did you not get it that you should RTFA?

He likes getting all these texts.
He blocks the most voluminous senders and reads the rest for giggles.

Re:Not a smart man

[networkBoy]

Like the guy who got "unknown" or some such for his licence plate. Got several thousand tickets in the mail each year.
-nB