email catch all domains - was Re: [WAR] Leaked recording proves John Kerry pushed for massive war in Syria, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey funded Al Qaeda

zen at freedbms.net zen at freedbms.net
Mon Oct 3 14:59:02 PDT 2016


For those not yet familiar with the convenience and utility of email
catch-all domains, they provides very convenient "canary" flagging of
who sold your email address to a third party marketer.

I.e., when you make a purchase at ebaysmells.com, and your email address
is for example ebaysmells.com at myfunkydomain.me, then when, some months
later you receive an email from Zhing Wha Good Electronics $2 sale, and
that email is sent to ebaysmells.com at myfunkydomain.me, you can have a
fair idea that either ebaysmells.com, or the shop/person you made your
original purchase from, is attempting to make opportunistic use of your
email address.

There are a couple issues with this feature however, which are mostly
evident to anyone who uses them:

- When you are legimitely emailed from the web shop, news media provider
  or other, then one wants or often enough actually needs, to reply to
  the sender using as a From address, the To address they used to email
  you. Not doing so can easily mean no response as your normal email
  address gets completely lost and not tracked in their CRM system.

- As one solution, some email clients can be configured to always reply
  From the same address To which the email was sent.

- This gives rise to the next problem which I keep slipping up on since
  I changed my MUA config, that my canary email addresses are being used
  as the From address when I forward emaisl, rather than just when I
  reply which is what I thought I'd configured. This may not be
  configurable, which would mean remembering to manually change the From
  address every time I forward an email.


I send this in the expectation that some may like to be aware of this
feature of domain management, when you own/ control your own domain.
Being able to rattle off a random (to the other person) but traceable
(by you) email address at conferences, to business people etc, is quite
a handy thing to be able to do.

Enjoy,
Zenaan


On Mon, Oct 03, 2016 at 10:31:10AM -0700, Sean Lynch wrote:
> I see Zenaan has dropped the pretense of not working for Russia Insider!
> 
> On Sun, Oct 2, 2016 at 5:55 PM, justa <russia-insider.com at freedbms.net>
> wrote:


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