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

[vux984]

If its a memo you send to 100,000 customers, and 90% of the responses are bounce messages, spam, and cruft from customers asking to be removed from the list (which is handled by clicking the 'remove me from the list link').

If they have a question about their last order, they'll just have to contact customer service. Having people wade through this crud, find the real odd customer question like 'what is the status of my last order' which is invariably missing crucial information like what they ordered, or which subsidiary in which country they placed an order with, or is in foreign language.

Its often simply just not practical nor worth the expense, even if it is good customer service.

Also there are countless scnearios where donotreply@company.com is used for internal memos etc. Where its your OWN employees that are the recipients. If I tell them do not reply, they shouldn't reply. There are other channels if they have questions or follow up ... like their manager, or HR, or whoever is identified in the memo as their follow up option.

at least the US

[thegnu]

I choose ethics over law (which, at least in the US, has little meaning).

Because the laws are better in umm... errr... hmmm... uhh... min...istan?

crudware.com == Microsoft

[flyingfsck]

An interesting trick: Type crudware.com into the Firefox address bar. It will do a Google 'I'm Feeling Lucky search and send you to Microsoft! Honest! Try it!