They Told You Not To Reply

Found on Washington Post on Friday, 21 March 2008
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When businesses want to communicate with their customers via e-mail, many send messages with a bogus return address, e.g. "somethinghere@donotreply.com."

As owner of www.donotreply.com, the Seattle-based programmer receives millions of wayward e-mails each week, including a great many missives destined for executives at Fortune 500 companies or bank customers, even sensitive messages sent by government personnel and contractors.

He says Capital One appears to have used donotreply.com as the return address for automated payment transfers and debits set up by customers.

"It's really kind of weird, because I'll get these faxes from Iraq, where they talk about various camps, when and where they're moving the support equipment, what they're buying, accident reports, and information on people applying for jobs," Faliszek said.

Faliszek said he is constantly threatened with lawsuits from companies who for one reason or another have a difficult time grasping why he is in possession of their internal documents and e-mails.

I would love to see such a lawsuit going to court: first you screw up, then you sue the one who by accident gets your information. Faliszek should just forward the emails to Wikileaks and let such companies learn it the hard way. Even more interesting is why he possesses their documents in an accessible format: one would think that banks and governments have some minimum security rules for communicating over insecure channels.