Tag: Contacts

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Have you ever abandoned an email address? Did you make sure everyone switched to your new one? If your old provider has reissued the address to someone new, your old contacts could still be sending mail to someone else with your personal information.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, but InformationWeek reports that Yahoo! users who’ve picked up recycled addresses are getting important mail meant for the previous owner of the email address.

It started off with some stuff from catalogs and clothing companies and I thought, ‘That’s fine, I’ll just unsubscribe.’…But then I started getting emails with court information, airline confirmations, a funeral announcement…

Update: Yahoo! is introducing a “not my email” button to report mistaken deliveries.

Well, that’s an interesting approach to the misdirected email problem. This might even be useful as a general solution beyond recycled addresses. I once ended up receiving someone else’s Sears receipt and promotions, I assume because of a sales clerk’s typo.

But I find myself wondering about the potential for backscatter, collateral loss of mail, and just how people will actually use it in relation to the report spam button.

And that’s just with the honest people who get the reused mailbox!

Update 2: For commercial email especially, XKCD points out the importance of actually verifying that the email address someone gave you is theirs, and not someone else’s address written as a typo, and Word to the Wise highlights some real-world cases they’ve written about in the past.

Originally posted as two link posts on Facebook and one on LinkedIn.

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Fury after Facebook messes up smartphone users’ address books:

Remember how Facebook sneakily changed your default email address to @facebook.com? … Some smartphone users…are reporting that their on-phone address books have been silently updated to make @facebook.com email addresses the default way to send a message to their contacts.Graham Cluley at Sophos

The lesson: Whenever you change something, always consider the impact on things that depend on it.

This reminds me of the ill-fated Network Solutions attempt to replace failed DNS lookups with responses directing web browsers to search pages, not considering that web browsers aren’t the only software that uses DNS, or that some of that software might depend on accurate “this domain does not exist” info.

Originally posted on Google+

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Two years ago, the company I work for moved to a new office. We used to do most of our domain name registrations through Network Solutions, mainly out of habit from when they were the only registrar, and accounts were of two types:

  1. Contacts. This involved a person or role and contact information.
  2. Domain names. This involved the person or company who registered the domain name, and links to three contacts (admin, technical, and billing).

So I had a contact account for any registrations we did on our clients’ behalf. We moved – again, this was two years ago – and I updated the address.

Network Solutions has restructured their entire account system into something immensely complicated. Somehow this single contact account has been split into three separate accounts, none of which had the password I started with, and all of which had the old address.

Yes, all three redundant accounts showed the address and phone number that I deleted two years ago.

We used to have people lose their domain names (or at least get them put on hold) because they never gave NS their new address when they moved, and they wouldn’t get the renewal notice. I guess these days it doesn’t really matter. Even if you do update your address, they’ll revert it anyway.

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