Into.the.Void.

Say that a user has an email account at the company he works for. Before going on vacation he activates his cool “vacation auto-reply” feature that adds

Out of Office – I will be back from holidays at the end of July.

on the top and then quotes the email he was sent.

During his vacation, he receives a call and he is told he has to urgently sent an email about some financial updates. He rushes to an internet cafe and sends the email. He makes a mistake though and mistypes one of the email addresses of the recipients. Instead of sending the email to “user@domain.com” he sends it at “usar@domain.com”.

His company’s SMTP server though receives the following error message from the remote SMTP server while trying to deliver the email:

<usar@domain.com>: host mx.domain.com[1.2.3.4] said: 550 5.1.1
   <usar@domain.com>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command)

This means that his SMTP server will then send an email to him informing him about the error and quoting parts if not all of the email he had previously sent. The email will likely appear to be from “postmaster@company.com” or “do-not-reply@company.com” or something similar.
It will look like this:

This is the mail system at host mail.company.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

                  The mail system

<usar@domain.com>: host mx.domain.com[1.2.3.4] said: 550 5.1.1
   <usar@domain.com>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; mail.company.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: AE4812AE328
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; employee1@company.com
Arrival-Date: Thu,  5 May 2011 20:05:27 +0200 (CEST)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; usar@domain.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822;usar@domain.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mx.domain.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550 5.1.1 <usar@domain.com>... User unknown

From: Loyal Employee <employee1@company.com>
Date: July 5, 2011 9:05:29 PM GMT+03:00
To: User User <usar@domain.com>
Subject: Re: Financial updates

Financial data goes here

But the user has still his vacation auto-reply turned on, so when the automatic postmaster’s email reaches his mailbox, the system will automatically reply back to the “postmaster@company.com” quoting the previous email and adding his auto-reply message:

Out of Office – I will be back from holidays at the end of July.

So the postmaster@company.com currently has all the financial details that he shouldn’t!

Apart from the fact that the user was sending financial data to somebody else in a clear text email instead of an encrypted one, the second biggest mistake that the user has made was that he has enabled vacation auto-replies that quote the email he was previously sent. That’s very very wrong. If you don’t want sensitive stuff ending at the postmaster’s inbox avoid quoting previous emails in your auto-replies by all means.

Based on a true story 🙂

Filed by kargig at 12:20 under Internet,Privacy
Tags: auto-reply, email, Privacy, vacation
2 Comments | 15,156 views