Stray e-mails
Vancouver Sun: “Stray e-mails”
Stray e-mails is a problem. Especially if you are on the senders’ side. I’m sure most of us at some point have ended up including too many people (”reply all”??) or misspelling a domain name.
An article in the Vancouver Sun today underlines the importance of spelling e-mail addresses right and not expecting e-mail messages in general to be “secure”. To me the story also raises a question about ethics.
The owner of the infrastructure.ca domain has “for several years” (WHOIS says the domain was registered in 2000) been getting misdirected e-mails, [some] containing inside information about the Liberal government.
Sender beware! You never know who will be reading your e-mails!
On the other hand, this could have been an easy problem to fix for the domain owner - especially after several years of “problems”.
Some issues to consider:
1) He probably used the “catch-all” setting for e-mail, limiting the number of valid e-mail adresses would have been simple.
2) He could have deleted the e-mails. Instead it looks like he read every little detail.
The owner is now negotiating with the Canadian government for them to purchase his domain. He’s been asking $70,000! This amount has now been reduced to $25,000. The offer from our government: $5,000!
As people are likely to continue mistyping domain names, I suggest they use an outside agency to set the value. A Google search on Domain Valuation lists quite a few providers that is willing to do this.
This will make sure the asking price is not seen as black-mail and the offer price is not seen as a “cover-up”.
For the rest of us, we need to make sure we use the right e-mail addresses, not send confidential materials by e-mail …. and maybe delete incoming e-mail not intended for us? Telling the sender their e-mail went astray is a nice thing to do as well, but maybe not that practical for higher volumes.
Oh yes, if you are interested in politics … you might want to read the whole article on your own.
roar at roarweb dot com
Note: This post moved from Blogger on December 6, 2005