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The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

krebsonsecurity.com

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Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#171

Post by jlokier »

jen729w wrote: post #134
cik wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I feel your pain. One of my emails is @ .com. This fails verification on so many websites it's just comical. I then figured on making a @ .com. Turns out folks mostly validate .com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. It's frustrating.

I gave up using mail@ .network because of the significant percentage of sites that refuse the .network TLD. One large financial services provider even told me that their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain. So .ninja is A-OK. I pointed out how ludicrous this was, and they told me it was their "policy" again, and that's why Australian Super doesn't have any of my money.

> their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain

Wow, no country codes? I could understand a restriction dating from before the great expansion of TLDs, but expect it to have a 2 in it.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#172

Post by maccard »

ValentineC wrote: post #119
cik wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I feel your pain. One of my emails is @ .com. This fails verification on so many websites it's just comical. I then figured on making a @ .com. Turns out folks mostly validate .com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. It's frustrating.

> Turns out folks mostly validate .com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. I wonder what happens with .co.uk, and other two-letter second-level domains.

My student email was @tcd.ie - I had plenty of websites I wasn't able to sign up to, offers I couldn't redeem and mail that just never arrived...

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#173

Post by chris_overseas »

I have this problem, and I've lost count of the number of people who've either signed up for services using my account instead of their own, or alternatively people who send me emails that are intended for someone else after (presumably) miss-hearing an email address that was read out to them over the phone or whatever. Some of the highlights:

- People have bought iPhones, XBoxes, Playstations, ... and created the respective accounts using my email address. - Holiday bookings, flights, accommodation bookings. - A PayPal account that was created using my address five years ago that I'm still trying to get PayPal to resolve. - I've been sent death certificates, wills, lawsuits, confidential legal docs. - Someone bought a car. I received all the transaction details and was signed up to a variety of free services that appear to have been bundled with the car.

One of the most frustrating things about this is that it's generally impossible to contact the person who make the mistake directly, so resolving it often involves jumping through lots of hoops and explanations to third party websites or other individuals. The other huge frustration is the sheer number of sites that don't validate email addresses. Or perhaps worse (and I'm looking at you PayPal), send a validation email but then create the account and assume everything's fine regardless, with no way to opt out or reject the verification.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#174

Post by Jestar342 »

kstrauser wrote: post #87

Ugh, this is my life. Yes, including accusations of “hacking” when someone signed up for Facebook with my email. On the plus side, this personal experience made me very adamant about protecting mistakenly-registered users at my employer. When we were planning to add logged in accounts to our service, the sales team (understandably!) wanted the signup process to be as frictionless as possible, and thought that new use…

I happened to be online the moment outlook.com launched and registered a @outlook.com email address and walked away from it exactly because of this.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#175

Post by dredmorbius »

See Gus Andrews, "Anatomy of an Accidental Honeypot" frome HOPE 2020:

https://scheduler.hope.net/hope2020/talk/79JKLA/

Video:

https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_1800_Anato... (you may have to go through the video selector at Archive.org)

On the joys of owning gandrews gmail com.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#177

Post by taejo »

nicoburns wrote: post #163
taejo wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're using "example" as a metasyntactic variable, or you're actually the owner of example.com. If it's the latter, I do use your domain for forms that require an email but I don't actually want feedback from. In my defense, your web page says "You may use this domain in literature without prior coordination or asking for permission." This isn't literature, but I didn't think I needed permission or c…

They own "example. ". Which is basically asking for trouble given that "example.com" is explicitly set aside for this kind of demo/throwaway purpose.

Not sure how I missed that. Thanks for clarifying.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#178

Post by 0xFluegel »

lorenzhs wrote: post #165
omnibrain wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have something similar when I used contact@ . .name There were various ways in which that failed. 1. ".name" was pretty new by then, so some frontends did not accept it 2. some frontends objected to the third level of my domain part, accepting third levels only in such cases as the well know. ".co.uk" for example 3. some frontends let me sign up, but something in the backend failed, I can only suspect if it was the…

The number of sites that send mail to "foo@bar.com" when you give them "foo@sub.bar.com" is staggering, too. It's a mystery to me why they would ever want to do that, but it happens a lot.

I can see how that happens immediatly...

    var domain = addr.split(['@','.']).take_last(2)
    var tld = domain[1]
    // check TLD against wacky rules...
See, boss, it's easy. What's next?

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#179

Post by eythian »

frabcus wrote: post #62
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #9

Its pretty ridiculous that web services still allow you to sign up without verifying your email.

It’s even more ridiculous that it is 2020 and the only method to get a verified email is by sending an email with a link. There should be a standardised protocol and flow which makes the experience much better for both users and developers.

Technically there is, I think SMTP has 'VRFY' or similar to check if an email address exists. However I recall reading (like, over a decade ago) that it's often not supported as it makes it easier for spammers to validate real email addresses.

Re: The joys of owning an ‘OG’ email account

#180

Post by mysterydip »

jen729w wrote: post #134
cik wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I feel your pain. One of my emails is @ .com. This fails verification on so many websites it's just comical. I then figured on making a @ .com. Turns out folks mostly validate .com in my experience, which I assume is because of good old mail.com. It's frustrating.

I gave up using mail@ .network because of the significant percentage of sites that refuse the .network TLD. One large financial services provider even told me that their "policy" was to allow 3, 4, or 5 characters as the last part of the domain. So .ninja is A-OK. I pointed out how ludicrous this was, and they told me it was their "policy" again, and that's why Australian Super doesn't have any of my money.

I would bet on a number of sites this is because they all copied and pasted the same email validation regrex they found online when googling, which was made before TLDs could be that long, and they don't know how to fix it.
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