What Happens To Bounced @Donotreply.com E-Mails

An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post's Security Fix blog today features a funny but scary interview with a guy in Seattle who owns the domain name donotreply.com. Apparently, everyone from major US banks to the Transportation Security Administration to contractors in Iraq use some variation on the address in the "From:" field of all e-mails sent out, with the result that bounced e-mails go to the owner of donotreply.com.'With the exception of extreme cases like those mentioned above, Faliszek says he long ago stopped trying to alert companies about the e-mails he was receiving. It's just not worth it: Faliszek said he is constantly threatened with lawsuits from companies who for one reason or another have a difficult time grasping why he is in possession of their internal documents and e-mails.'"

Comments

Re:WTF

[iamhigh]

Well, if you are signing up for a network management seminar, or something of the like, then you might also be the person that gets abuse@yourcompany.com, admin@yourcompany.com, it@yourcompany.com and a host of other generic email addresses. So perhaps you don't want them to even have your domain name?

Re:I did this once.

[kju]

I had a similar experience. A mobile phone operator (now defunct) allowed its customers to get mailadresses under their domain. So i got postmaster@domain which was accepted happily by the system. I deleted the alias a few days later though, because the amount of mail really got out of hand. I heard from another sysadmin who using the forged name "Andreas Buse" registered the mailadress abuse@... with his provider. :-)

Re:you can own the headline domain

[Teflon_Jeff]

Kicks and giggles. I thought it would be funny to have an @donotreply.com e-mail address. had I known about all the crap that would filter through, I probably would have sold it.