Phone Rants About: Careful with that Email, Eugene

PhoneBoy Rants About: Careful with that Email, Eugene!

Here's an email I got a while back from Fred Barling over at LowComDom, whom RadioNet fans will recongize as the host of RadioNet Internet Talk Radio.

Internet is becoming popularized in China. More and more people have opened an email account. However, there are still some problems with this new media. Mis-delivery is a serious one. Last week a Beida graduate student called Li Na tried to send a "have a try" email to his classmate Zhao Wen-Jian, but that message was sent to Mr. Li Peng, one of the top leaders in China, by mistake. As a result, Mr. Li was surprised by the following message: "Hi, Fatty: How are you? This is only a try. By the way, the yellow joke you told last night is just great."

The next day, Li Na received an email from "security@zhongnanhai.cn" in which he was told: "We have evidence to proof that you have been tapping the highest security hotlines of government. Any attempt to bug the tele-phone talk of country leaders is illegal."

Footnote: Li Peng is the Premire who ordered to kill Peking students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 crackdown.

Mis-addressed email is something that I deal with all the time. I get email sent to a variety of different users at uplink.com, a domain that I own. I think this mainly has to do with the number of similar domains to uplink.com, aside from the fact it could be a typo for "iplink.com". What it turned out to be was there is an ISP in Pennsylvania that calls itself "UpLink." However, their domain name is csrlink.com -- not uplink.com. Anyway, here's what InterNIC has to say when I do a search on uplink:

UPLINK Computer Services, Inc. (UPLINK-NET-DOM)                 UPLINK-NET.COM
UPLINK INTERNATIONAL LTD (UPLINKWEB2-DOM)                        UPLINKWEB.COM
UpLink Technologies - Internet Services Group (UPLINK2-DOM)         UPLINK.NET
Uplink Communications (UP-LINK-DOM)                                UP-LINK.COM
Uplink Corporation (UPLINKCORP-DOM)                             UPLINKCORP.COM
Uplink Systems (UPLINK-DOM)                                         UPLINK.COM
Uplink Technologies (UPLINK-TECHNOLOGIES-DOM)          UPLINK-TECHNOLOGIES.COM
Uplink Technologies (UPLINKTECH-DOM)                            UPLINKTECH.COM

What's curious is that the InterNIC record for uplinkweb.com has one of the contacts listed with an uplink.com address, which I found out about when I got a "final billing notice" for uplinkweb.com from the InterNIC. It's really pathethic when the person who created the domain can't get his own email address right:

UPLINK INTERNATIONAL LTD (UPLINKWEB2-DOM)
   P.O. Box 28
   Carterton,
   NZ

   Domain Name: UPLINKWEB.COM

   Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
      McConchie, Evan  (EM1083)  jarrod@UPLINK.COM
      0064 3797976 (FAX) ask when you cal
   Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
      Bennett, Robert  (RB1043)  rob@ADGRAFIX.COM
      617-523-2822

   Record last updated on 30-Nov-96.
   Record created on 16-Nov-96.

I got enough mis-directed emil that I set up a filter program with an autoresponder that responds back to any message with a "To" header that I do not recognize. The autoresponder message basically tells people that they've sent email to an invalid email address and to remove the user from any mailing lists and such. The side effect of this filter is that it also gets about 95% of the spam that people send me as well.

The point is: Be careful where you send that email and be even more careful that you give out your correct email address. There's so such thing as "almost correct" like there is with postal mail. It's either exactly right or it's bounced.

Last Update: 27 July 1997
Return to PhoneBoy's Internet Guide