Do Not Reply

Okay, not really, but I am reading many of your titles, senders and deciding if the spammer should be white listed….

Seems the fine city of Hillsboro Texas is running The Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall 300. Why in the hell they name it “The Barracuda Networks Spam Firewall 3000″ is beyond me, but there you go.

So these bright folks have their quarantine summaries emailed to them from system at donotreply dot com. Problem is when it bounces, it comes to me. And this just isn’t an alert email, but the entire list of emails waiting in quarantine - as an added bonus it also includes all their logins and password so I can go in and white list an email for that cum enhancer product they have all be waiting for.

While most of it is spam, there seems to also be a few choice emails as well. But I can’t blame a city where the mayor is paid $100 a month and councilmen $5 a meeting. I would blame the contractor that set this system up… So much so, I wasn’t going to post this. I have tried 5 times to call the person they say is in charge, but each time I get a fax responding. When I point that out to the operator, they say everyone else can get through. Oh well… here you go Hillsboro Texas.

7/13/2007
Dear NAME REMOVED,

Thank you for your recent payment to Capital One. This email is to confirm your authorization on 7/13/2007 9:24:37 AM for an electronic debit of your checking account in the amount of 215.00.

This payment will be effective on 7/13/2007 or shortly thereafter. If your financial institution is unable to process the electronic debit, Capital One is authorized to submit a paper draft for this transaction amount. In the event the debit to your account is returned unpaid, an additional return item will be debited from your bank account.

If you have any questions, or if this confirmation does not accurately reflect your payment, please contact us immediately at CONTACT INFO REMOVED.

Sincerely,
Capital One

This is a great bunch of info to social engineer this poor woman out of her identity… She has a unique name and I was able to find one hit in a national phone database. So I can guess I have her phone number and address because the bounced email was from a university address… and thanks to capitol one I also have the date and amount of her last payment…

Also got some replies thanks to Capitol One’s high tech way of handling bounces. I won’t reveal the address they used at donotreply.com - but it is pretty stupid (obviously).

I checked my bank account and found that the money was not withdrawn so I paid again. This time I set it up so that my bank sends Capital One the money ($351.49). I hope this does not reflect bad on me. The money should be coming from my bank to Capital One on the 24th.

I will set up the next Payment as soon as the next statement is sent.

Please let me know if there is anything else i should do.

Yes, you should contact Capitol One and tell them to not use a domain they do not own in the sending address of their payment confirmation emails.

Hopefully Capitol One reads this, gets pissed at me, and saves about 500 trees by not sending me their daily pleas to sign up for one of their credit cards.

OMG! Like you should so fix that critical system. ortegav seems to be bouncing emails so I am not sure anyone is going to know that this system is down! If you had used an address to send these emails from other than - ITAssistant at donotreply dot com, someone else would be aware this critical system is down.

But since you didn’t. It looks like just me and US1EX213 know it is down.

Oh noes! Now US1TCS229 is down!
And US1TCS234!!
And… and you are burying my email server in your critical system down messages.

One last one because this is just predicting failure, quick!!! GET TO IT!!!!

US1DB206 (IP: 10.169.1.133 and Service Tag: 8D42391 ) has experienced a Warning Alert message ID: 2094, Array disk warning. Predictive Failure reported, Controller 0, Connector 0, Physical Disk 0:1 on 07/15/07 at 15:32:57:000

Ohh… too late.

US1DB206 (IP: 10.169.1.133 and Service Tag: 8D42391 ) has experienced a Critical System is down: US1DB206 on 07/15/07 at 17:25:36:000

It seems Valencia community college has never written the update for their atlas/pipeline software. Sungardhe the makers of software for universities at one time used donotreply.com as their example domain to use, instead of the made just for this - example.com.

Since most workers at universities are mindless sheep, instead of filling that example in with something meaningful, they just emailed away from do.not.reply at donotreply dot com. This little example has generate more email than any other source. To Sungardhe’s credit (or whoever owned this software before), after threatening to somehow sue me for this, they did send an update suggesting people to stop using donotreply.com and they changed their documentation.

But some people are slow to try new things. So Valencia has been bouncing me email for many years now. The latest from a Professor of Speech letting people know they… well if you wonder why she still uses the wrong email, here is the first paragraph from her email.

> So you really wanted to go to Europe with us this year, but just couldn’t save enough money in time? No worries! We have selected our trip for Summer 2008 and if you register now, you will have 10 months to pay!

So if you couldn’t afford to go on the yearly trip, if you save now, you can go next year… This earth shattering news of how time works so startled Maquerita, she replied with “ok I am in!”.

She wasn’t alone in replying.

Majidah asked, “Does this price include the cost of hotels, food, tour, and airfare?”

Dawn asked, “What’s with the age bountry?”

Richard let here know, “If we can smoke blunts in Amsterdam, I might want to do this. Email details!”

And good thing they are planning ahead, because when there were only 2 spots left for this year’s tour, Stephanie tried for free tickets with this heartfelt email: “i would love to go to see Amsterdam has always been a dream of mine unfortunately i do not have that kind of cash i am disabled and live on a fixed income. maybe you could show me picture or send them to my e-mail when you return have fun”

Since no one ever got Stephanie’s email because she emailed it to donotreply.com instead of valenciacc.edu, I almost feel guilty not sending her a couple of pictures myself.

From brother.com who sends out their weekly reports from MIS at donotreply dot com

If we remove NAMEREMOVED without a replacement

none of the data referencing him will show on the weekly

reports.

Is this ok ?

Thanks

George

No George, it isn’t okay. Okay?

Seems someone at char-broil’s customer support just doesn’t want customers to reply to certain customer service emails.

This always confuses me. A company sends out a correspondence to one of their customers. Instead of allowing the customer to simply reply to the email, they make their customers jump through hoops to send back an email - even if the original email is requesting more information.

The worst of it is, these types of emails often include sensitive data that the customer thinks they are sending to the initial company. But as in char-broil’s case, they aren’t. They are sending it to me because char-broil decided to put the reply email as DO_NOT_REPLY@donotreply.com. Look at that quality customer service, they even bolded the one DO NOT REPLY just to let customers know how serious they are about having you not reply to their email.

So what do I get from char-broil customers?

Pictures of receipts, photos of grills, upset customers just trying to get their freaking grill to work, not wanting to learn about the intricacies of email. It is depressing.

Here is an example,

I could not figure out how to attach this to the repond portion of your correspondence. You can see from the picture I took from the back of the grill there is no serial number available. I have looked the grll over and can not find the serial number anywhere else. I have other pictures of my grill if you need them. Hopefully this will allow you to go ahead and process my case.

Thank you very much for your help.

PERSONAL CONTACT INFO REMOVED

or desperate pleas like this:

Hello,
It has been over two weeks and I still have not
received the missing piece I called about. I sent you
a copy of the receipt weeks ago and was told I would
get the part in the mail in 7-10 days. If you could
please help me or recommend me to someone who can I
would really appreciate it.
Thanks,
P D
PERSONAL INFO REMOVED

She is never going to get that missing piece, and no fault of her own. Instead of replying to the original email she was sent, she was supposed to send an email to a different address or visit a website and submit that information. So for that, no grilling.

And I will end with an email that should be included in the file of char broil’s customer service head when they finally give them the axe.

I received this e:mail last month and I’m confused. This says that you “provided requested information”. When, where, how???? I have received nothing from you including a response for the past year.
And I tried to click on both areas that said click here to respond, with no luck.

5863 - 85747 - 1775
2234 - 84115 - 0347
6010 - 98203 - 7367
7557 - 95823 - 1279

The first number is your customer’s street address. The second is their zipcode. The third is the last 4 digits of their phone number.

Now… I can either have this information because I am a super smart hacker, or because you are a super stupid company.

I won’t kid myself on what that answer is… So can you kids please stop sending me so much email with all the personal information of your customers? Okay? Stop, otherwise I will contact 3253 - 85746 - 9204 and let her know you are sending me her private information.

Thanks!

As always, you can have your lawyers send their threats to chet at poe-news dot com. Send your phone number, lets chat!

Headline sounds pretty crazy, right? Couldn’t possibly be true… the biggest software developer in the world paying the very pirate sites pirating their wares? Is this a new side of Microsoft? Maybe embracing open-source with some free software give-aways?

Or is this just a corporation so out of touch, the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing? Here are the ads.

So I contacted Microsoft asking them why they supported piracy, I figured they would jump all over this? Right? I even attached a photo of the site, ads, and pirated software all together.

Microsoft’s response.

This is Michelle and I understand that you are having issues with MS Windows Vista program. I apologize for the inconveniences this matter may have cause you.

I suggest that you contact the support group of Windows Vista as they are in a better position to address this particular concern. You may reach the support through the link below.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/support/default.aspx

You can also send feedback to :

https://support.microsoft.com/common/survey.aspx?scid=sw;en;1255&showpage=1&ws=msdn&sd=msdn&pa=msdnw

Oh well…

And don’t even bother attacking me for talking about pirate sites and their ad revenue. Because if you think they run these giant pirate sites because they want information to be free, and not the ad money, I have some blah blah blah I want to sell you.

Altiris.com claims:

A wise man does not migrate alone. Mange the mysteries of Windows Vista migration with Altiris. OS migration can be intimidating. But with Altris, you can easily avoid unexpected pitfalls.

Well… Altris has one little pitfall of their own. They use donotreply.com in a return address for their ITSSC Helpdesk. What does this mean? I get all of their email bounced to me, and I get the replies to the trouble tickets from people who do not pay attention to the subtle domain name - donotreply.com. To be fair to the users, the messages generated do not actually say not to reply to them, they just use donotreply.com as the address and this at the bottom of the email – “Thank you for using SEI Helpdesk. Please contact the helpdesk immediately if you are unsatisfied with the resolution to your problem”

So to help out Altiris, I thought I would pass a couple of messages on to them that they never got since they used my domain. These users responded to the helpdesk message, and that means Altiris never saw the emails, but I did.

Glenn R Smith rebooted and that solved the problem. So cancel his service order.

Good for you Glenn, you learned the #1 rule in fixing computers, when in doubt reboot. So congrats to you for being a user who is able to do some basic troubleshooting on your own. You are a dream to most support reps.

Uh oh! From the same company a Tony Kozich replied 40 minutes after the above email to say, “Thank You”. I guess I should let Tony know that he should be thanking Glenn, not Altiris. Or maybe just pass it on to Glenn, but Tony signed his email in a big fancy font, so I doubt anyone really wants to talk to him. I have found people using the fancy font in emails are normally the people you want to avoid.

So there are just a couple for you Altiris. No big deal though right? Hey, the above are only quoted from a defense contractor…

Valueclick is currently running this ad on their network.

Classy. Hey, when you want people to sign up to get spammed*, you have to inflame them. And what the hell, it is just a murdered child, surely that is fair game right?

To be honest, we used to use valueclick/fastclick on our sites. They served cpm/cpc ads. But since valueclick and fastclick merged, they have gone down hill. From countless posts like this one, about dropping rates, to numerous accusations of trojan installs. Life just isn’t easy being a scumbag these days…

How conflicted is Valueclick? Valueclick owns Commission junction. On commission junction, they forbid the use of 180 Solutions/Zango to advertise their merchants (or at least they did), while they ban it there, they actually promote Zango using their valueclick/fastclick division. And the CJ side even warned merchants of shady CPA networks using companies like 180 solutions/zango… which maybe they only had issues if they didn’t signup by clicking on their own ad… or something. if you are confused, don’t worry. The rest of this is pretty straightforward.

Here is the landing page for that ad. So the deal is, to get your gift card, you have to give them info, fill out a survey, get spammed, blah blah blah…

But only the bottom of the barrel advertisers would use a child’s death to promote their special offers right? Well… sadly not really. Among the advertisers being promoted with this exciting contest is - Wal*Mart, Netflix, OldNavy, ADT security, Quicken Loans, Carnival Cruises, Block Buster, Discover Card and a bunch of companies that you would think were scummy enough to promote themselves this way.

I know, I am being an idiot. This is just business… and if you can’t capitalize on the death of a child, how in the hell do we expect anyone to make a buck?

* According to siteadvisor.com, popculturesurvey.com generated 291 spammy emails a week.

Feel free to take this article, post it on yout site, put your name on it, do whatever you want. I just want to get the word out.

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