Re: Find e-mail address based on first and last name
On Thu, 22 May 2025 11:57:28 -0400
The Wanderer <wanderer@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> On 2025-05-22 at 10:53, Jan Claeys wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 2025-05-21 at 15:16 +0100, Joe wrote:
> >
> >> There was a time you could have emailed postmaster@<domain> and
> >> asked that a message be forwarded to the person, but I think now
> >> few domains actually have a postmaster user or alias.
> >
> > Any mailserver accepting mail for a particular domain without having
> > a properly configured postmaster address is not spec-compliant (and
> > probably deserves to be blacklisted).
> >
> > https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5321.html#section-4.5.1
I'm aware of that.
>
> These days, I would be *surprised* if most mail-accepting domains
> *did* have a postmaster address - and even more so if they actually
> had someone monitoring it, or otherwise ensuring that mail sent to it
> didn't just get dropped into the bit bucket.
>
> RFC / spec compliance can easily be, and I suspect usually is,
> disregarded in this regard.
>
> I just chalk it up as another one of the Nice Things that We Can't
> Have, because of the usual Reason Why: if we have the Nice Things,
> bad actors (in this case, spammers) will take advantage of them to
> exploit people.
>
Theoretically, but I think that spammers only want to reach easily
fooled people, and prefer not to come to the attention of the IT admin
for the domain.
I've accepted and aliased postmaster and abuse for more than twenty
years, in which time I've had two spams, obviously both from the same
source.
Certainly the big fish in the pool (Yahoo, Google etc.) don't accept
them, because then people would be able to complain about spam from
their customers, which they make extraordinarily difficult to do.
--
Joe
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