That was an incredible read. Terrifying actuality. So obvious once you think about it.
This needs a government / IEEE / domain registrar policy of some sort. Maybe it should simply be that all expired domains are put into stasis for 10 years.
If you want to buy it and have access to it sooner, then you need to run (and pay for) a program of works to catch and proactively kill all linked accounts, and build a register of embargoed existing email addresses that must be set to bounce.
I knew this was a problem, but wow, had no idea it was this bad...
Because I have a firstname.lastname@popularcloudemail.domain type email, I get SOOO many people signing up for accounts with my email, forgetting that theirs had some number suffix. I get peoples phone bills, pizza receipts, Amazon orders, parking meter e-receipts, Xbox live accounts, Dropbox logins, you name it.
I NEVER thought of what that would look like at a domain level!
Some emails that came in looked as if they came from vulnerable people themselves, asking for help. It may be that they haven’t received or understood the message to update their address book.
I did not interfere with any of the e-mails, as this would go beyond the objectives of this investigation, but it is concerning, to say the least, that these individuals will never receive a reply. They would not have received a response anyway, but it makes me wonder how many cries for help get lost in abandoned e-mail inboxes.
This honestly depressed me, I know firsthand many people who need help from someone who has more or less knowledge to understand something as simple as the migration of a service or an email, it is really depressing not only to know that this happens, but also that There are people who are such bastards that take advantage of this.
Could someone explain to me how the author gained access to "I forgot my password" accounts that were not his but were in his domain? I mean, I understand that it's on his domain, but just because I have the domain mydomain@domain.com does that mean I can redirect all emails to the main domain? Excuse the dumb question.
What you’d buy is “domain.com” and can then redirect any emails of the form “<anything>@domain.com” or even things like “<anything>@<anything>.domain.com”.
In fact, any email ending in “.domain.com” or “@domain.com”. And you could set up a wildcard to catch all emails without having to setup that specific email first.
Yes, if you have a domain you can catch all emails being sent there even if you don't know the name - having the domain means controlling the bit after the @, so every email address with that ending.
I think you are a bit confused about the E-mail structure.
Everything behind the @ is the domain, on your case "domain.com" Before the @ is just a name that can be used as you, the domain owner, wants.
If you want to redirect all mail to yourname@domain.com, that's very easy to do AND you can still see the original e-mail address these nails were sent to.
So I assume for example Dropbox sent some commercial mail about current offers. Using that, he knew the old account and that it was signed up to Dropbox
what is "artificially increasing the ranking of other sites"?
Search engines such as Google need to rank results in some way, to decide which ones to display on top.
This algorithm changes depending on new developments, both cultural and technical, see Google recently putting results from reddit firsts.
One typical way to do this is checking "how many other websites are pointing at this result", and since traffic is money, people try to game the algorithm by creating fake websites which links to the one they want to push.
In particular, it refers to PageRank, the algorithm that set Google apart from its predecessors and upon which it was originally built.
I am very glad that most my mail stuff still goes through other providers, but I do use my domain's mail for purposes related to my server and its services, and wow, this is unnerving....
So governments should, if their country doesn't have a government TLD, register gov.yourtld and put everything in subdomains, I guess
