I have a very early Gmail account I still use which collects an unbelievable amount of other people's emails who cannot be bothered to fill out a form correctly, hotel reservations, insurances. I could cancel them all easily and mess with people but I delete and move on.
It's easy to be a bad actor given the conditions that the internet was built on.
There was a CCC talk with a similar approach, where researches bought expired government domains and typo / bit flip domains. For example: bund.de is managed by the German Federal Government and they purchased bund.ee, the Estonian TLD, which is both a typo and bit flip and started watching email and DNS requests coming in.
Tangently related, but what do you do when you receive other people's email?
There're a couple of people with my name, one in Arkansas and another in South Carolina, and I get all sorts of email for them. They include their middle initial, but many people forget to include that middle initial, so I get utility bills, medical records, all kinds of things. Most of the time I delete it, but.. I feel kind of bad
I have a very early Gmail account I still use which collects an unbelievable amount of other people's emails who cannot be bothered to fill out a form correctly, hotel reservations, insurances. I could cancel them all easily and mess with people but I delete and move on.
It's easy to be a bad actor given the conditions that the internet was built on.
https://archive.is/xn3gW
There was a CCC talk with a similar approach, where researches bought expired government domains and typo / bit flip domains. For example: bund.de is managed by the German Federal Government and they purchased bund.ee, the Estonian TLD, which is both a typo and bit flip and started watching email and DNS requests coming in.
German language only unfortunately https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-verlorene-domains-offene-turen-w...
This was a great one. The bit flipped domains idea is incredible.
someone once bought dozen of google.com bit flipped domains hehe.
Circuit City was a popular misspelled domain back in the early 2000s.
Same thing with the example.com domain until RFC 2606 put an end to it.
IANA always held the example.com domain, RFC 2606 just formalized it many years later.
Tangently related, but what do you do when you receive other people's email?
There're a couple of people with my name, one in Arkansas and another in South Carolina, and I get all sorts of email for them. They include their middle initial, but many people forget to include that middle initial, so I get utility bills, medical records, all kinds of things. Most of the time I delete it, but.. I feel kind of bad
I suggest writing a rule to send an auto-reply, like this: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-mailmaint-wrong-...
That document tweaks the unsubscribe to say "unsubscribe because wrong recipient", most parsers won't notice the "because".