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Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

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Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#181

Post by steveBK123 »

1a527dd5 wrote: post #10

I have a version of this; I have the email {{popular-asian-surname}}@gmail.com and I've seen _everything_. I've had many many bank statements from India. I've had someone in California order a brand new BMW and got the details for collection. I've had paypal invoices and statements (this is one funny because they refuse to action the delink). I used to reach out and tell them I didn't sign up for their service. But h…

This seems incredibly rampant on gmail. On the one hand I signed up early enough to have @gmail.com

Unfortunately people in countries of my parents native language seem to think my email address is theirs, and I get EVERYTHING. Vacation photos, medical records, car service reminders, the whole lot.

What's interesting is that none of the spam filters seem to have a "I'm a dumb American, I cannot read this language, therefore anything in this language should be spam" rule.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#182

Post by chrisandchris »

IAmBroom wrote: post #98
fsckboy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> email / gmail is not case sensitive Jsmith@gmail.com is the same as jsmith@gmail.com gmail is not case sensitive. email systems are allowed to be case sensitive, most choose not to be. This used to be an issue to deal with when pre-internet legacy email addresses (like Lotus Notes corporate email, or Outlook/Exchange systems) were put onto the internet.

Email systems are allowed to be within their own domains. If an email is sent from Yahoo.com to Gmail.com, case is irrelevant. So, assuming case matters is foolish.

> So, assuming case matters is foolish

Oh so much fun with my yearly quiz testing students about case-sensitivity! They're always wrong because thinks are so horribly broken.

It is absolutely foolish, assuming case _may_ not matter in the Internet. Case does not matter, true, except it does.

One of my favourite parts: URL paths are case-sensitive, except most servers do not care (because of a case-insensitive filesystem), and they're not always case-sensitive, e.g. for the mailto-scheme the path is case-insentive, because the path is actually an e-mail adress (which is itself case-insensitive).

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#184

Post by philjohn »

tonymet wrote: post #169

I live in a small town and I have my postmaster's personal cell phone number. She's very professional and attentive,. Based on our conversations, I don't believe USPS maintains the level of rigor for reliability that software engineers would expect (fire drills, KPIs for reliability, incident review, root cause analysis, etc). We started having serious issues with valuable mail turning up missing. Car registration ta…

Do they have the money to do that? Are the people in charge (through political appointment) incentivised to make the service better?

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#185

Post by tonymet »

philjohn wrote: post #184
tonymet wrote: post #169

I live in a small town and I have my postmaster's personal cell phone number. She's very professional and attentive,. Based on our conversations, I don't believe USPS maintains the level of rigor for reliability that software engineers would expect (fire drills, KPIs for reliability, incident review, root cause analysis, etc). We started having serious issues with valuable mail turning up missing. Car registration ta…

Do they have the money to do that? Are the people in charge (through political appointment) incentivised to make the service better?

The apathete's plea

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#186

Post by bxparks »

cmehdy wrote: post #165
bxparks wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, the first one 'は' seems really good. Out of 279 messages in my Spam folder, 216 messages matched that character, missing only 24 additional Japanese spam. (That means 240/279, or 86% of my spam is Japanese, god damn it). The second one 'す' matched only 10 Japanese spam messages.

You could also try the particle for belonging の which is a bit like " 's " in English. Should appear in hiragana (as a standalone syllable) frequently since it is a particle much like the first one they suggested (ha for the theme of a sentence). The second one (su) tends to be at the end of maybe half the verbs, might be why it's less likely. Another one which might match is Japanese punctuation, such as the comma 、…

Nice! The 'の' (237 matches) is even better than 'は' (216 matches). The 'の' matches every Japanese spam in my Spam folder.

I was not able to use comma 、 and the period 。 because I think FastMail disables searches on common punctuations, so those matched nothing.

(In case people are wondering, I sometimes scan through my Spam folder to check for false positives, i.e. things which were incorrectly marked as spam. It's difficult to do that when it is flooded with Japanese spam.)

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#187

Post by tonymet »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #174
tonymet wrote: post #169

I live in a small town and I have my postmaster's personal cell phone number. She's very professional and attentive,. Based on our conversations, I don't believe USPS maintains the level of rigor for reliability that software engineers would expect (fire drills, KPIs for reliability, incident review, root cause analysis, etc). We started having serious issues with valuable mail turning up missing. Car registration ta…

USPS risks becoming irrelevant if they don't actually start to care. In South Africa we have the South African Post Office which has consistently and increasingly been made redundant/irrelevant by the actions of one particular organization far more so than any other: The South African Post Office One of their biggest self-inflicted loss of relevance was due to a large strike by their workers in the early 2010's. Beca…

I appreciate this story. Institutions are made of people , and their service is only as good as the culture. The most important factor is whether people actually care . Leadership can then guide them in the right direction.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#188

Post by arantius »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #179
tonymet wrote: post #169

I live in a small town and I have my postmaster's personal cell phone number. She's very professional and attentive,. Based on our conversations, I don't believe USPS maintains the level of rigor for reliability that software engineers would expect (fire drills, KPIs for reliability, incident review, root cause analysis, etc). We started having serious issues with valuable mail turning up missing. Car registration ta…

Across two apartments in the last 5 years, I've received mail for no less than 5 different previous residents. Every week I'd end up with someone else's medical bills, bank statements, debt collection, the list goes on. I've zero faith at this point.

Receiving mail correctly at the address on the label isn't a problem with the post office.

Re: Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail

#189

Post by saghm »

mnw21cam wrote: post #125
saghm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think that they would be willing to interact with someone sending emails from the same address they're spamming!

My stock reply to this used to be that you can send emails from anyone - who the email is sent from is not authenticated. It's a little less true now with some of the newer protections, but only today I received a fairly subtle spam/scam supposedly from the main email address of a major retailer, so I think it's still sensible to never every trust the "From:" part of an email.

Sure, but they could just sent a link back to the same address with a form to fill out the complaint, or even just a phone number saying "call this number to speak to customer service about the issue you're having". From a technical standpoint, it's not hard at all to invert things to use the address as a recipient in a way that confirms that someone is able to access the email sent to it. A company like Experian that claims to have info on literally a billion people would be silly not to recognize that their scale is going to occasionally end up with mistaken contact info, so if they cared at all about the quality of their data, they would have some sort of system established to handle this.
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