This page is a memorial to Foo at Bar.com
Back in the earliest of early days, I (The Foo at bar.com) got a few emails a week, mostly from sysadmin type people who were invoking The Foo in an effort to debug some kind of system or other.
Of course I, being a gregarious sort, answered the messages. Mostly along the lines of "hello? Foo here. What can I do for you?Ó or "who you? I Foo.Ó
I met a lot of really interesting people in 1994 and 1995 that way.
But soon I had to return to obscurity, as my email volume grew overwhelming.
Y'see people building web sites started putting little "give us your email address and we'll let you see the goodies" challenges in their web sites, and lots of folks entered foo@bar.com.
Soon, I was getting thousands, then tens of thousands of emails a day, mostly from people who didn't care whether I replied or not. Alas, I was overwhelmed and had to return to my solitary life.
For a while, I MX'd email addressed to me to 127.0.0.1 but that made some people cranky (although I still take some quiet pleasure at the thought of what that address did to spammers).
I MX'd the mail over to a friend's spam-detection server for about 4 hours one time, but the volume crashed his server and he asked for relief.
So now I'm content to tell you this small story.
Onward,
The Foofoo@bar.com is a real email address
51–60 of 98 posts
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#52I thought this is basic knowledge of everyone technically engaged in Internet stuff. But apparently, this isn't the case, despite its well-known and very readable documentation! [1] It says: 1) There are exactly 3 domains the IANA keeps free for that purpose: example.com example.net example.org 2) In addition, all domains under the following 3 top level domains can be used freely for that purpose: *.test *.example *.…
Ironically, example.com/net/org were themselves taken over by IANA because they were the recipient of so much test email. ETA: I am now starting to doubt my memory here, and Google's USENET archive search is broken. Sigh.
Is this documented somewhere?
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#53I'd think you'd have to expect this when you set up that email account. (Also, it wasn't enough to spam them, now we DDoS them)
yeah, but it looks like he set it up waaaaaaaaaaaay back (like before the eternal September) solely in order to get a rise out of emailing people back. Then the internet blew up and broke his email.
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#54I now feel really really bad for fuck@off.com. I owe someone an apology...
You're fine, off.com doesn't have MX records.
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#55[deleted]
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#56If you really need to receive a test email, you can always use @mailinator.com (just make sure it's not sensitive info). Mailinator is a disposable, publicly viewable email address mostly useful for one-time account registrations, especially in cases where you fear they might spam you. In recent years, I started using the + notation at gmail -- anything you put after the + and before the @ is ignored by gmail, BUT yo…
I prefer to have my own domain, I just use nameofthesite@example.com, and set it up to catch-all.
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#57Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#58I thought this is basic knowledge of everyone technically engaged in Internet stuff. But apparently, this isn't the case, despite its well-known and very readable documentation! [1] It says: 1) There are exactly 3 domains the IANA keeps free for that purpose: example.com example.net example.org 2) In addition, all domains under the following 3 top level domains can be used freely for that purpose: *.test *.example *.…
*.local is a great example of why not to use a domain that just 'sounds good' as an internal dns suffix, as it is used by bonjour/avahi[1] I had to rename an entire corporate network once because the previous folks thought .local "looked good". It cause constant issues with clients that had bonjour or avahi running. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.local
Wait, why doesnt apple just fix its software? .local isn't reserved. Seems like picking some arbitrary fix over another isn't helping matters.
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#59I thought this is basic knowledge of everyone technically engaged in Internet stuff. But apparently, this isn't the case, despite its well-known and very readable documentation! [1] It says: 1) There are exactly 3 domains the IANA keeps free for that purpose: example.com example.net example.org 2) In addition, all domains under the following 3 top level domains can be used freely for that purpose: *.test *.example *.…
So I've wondered this for a long time.
Where does email sent to wildcard@example.com go? If I accidentally sent sensitive information to wildcard@example.com would some evil person (potentially at the IANA) be able to retrieve it someday?
Re: foo@bar.com is a real email address
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, example.com/net/org were themselves taken over by IANA because they were the recipient of so much test email. ETA: I am now starting to doubt my memory here, and Google's USENET archive search is broken. Sigh.
Is this documented somewhere?
I looked, but I can't figure out the right Google juice - example.com is, for obvious reasons, a pretty common search result on the web! USENET would be better, but Google Groups seems to not index words with periods in the middle; "example.com" returns only "example com" results.
It was common advice back in the day to use "example.invalid" and NOT kill some poor guy's server at example.com; I don't think .invalid was explicitly reserved before then, but it was known not to be a ccTLD or gTLD.