But they are not alone. It is kind of ironic when companies insist that we check the domain to spot spam but are unable publish a list with all domains they officially use to send mail.
Recently the regulatory bodies did just that and so the banks should only use 1600 numbers to contact their customers. My bank scam calls have dropped to 0.
(But in any case your bank will never call outwards to you, unless you've specifically requested that, which you almost never do.)
I’d been hunting for ways to use a Wisecard standoff a bank but got a bit wary of what would happen if they went bust. Government backed guarantee do not exist for Wise.
[1] https://xcancel.com/Abishek_Muthian/status/18063480222902113...
Truecaller cannot accurately tell you whether or not the person calling you from a phone number is actually in control of that phone number.
They have to make posts to assure people it's not a scam, especially as they'll ask you to mail ID etc to that address:
There should be a long list of companies whose policies are worse than theirs.
Yeah. I queried the 1st thing that came to mind and internalmicrosoft.com and microsoftinternal.com are available. With that much potential out there, I'd want to keep my official domain group tight.
That's because people report them as spam, so they hop domains to avoid that.
The real reason for multiple domains is likely more stupid than that. It’s likely because different teams want to move faster than the whole of Microsoft, so register a domain for their MVP to enable them to prototype like a start up. Because going through the usual hoops with enterprise regarding using their established domains will be a long and torturous process. And before long, their new prototype domain becomes so integrated into their product that adopting it as official is just easier than switching to microsoft.com.
I couldn’t say for sure that’s what has happened here. But it’s the story I’ve seen with domain ownership in other enterprises
...and microsoftonline.com is not among them (unlike microsoftonline.net and other variants). But it seems to have been registered in 2002, and the record looks legit:
It’d be interesting to hear a senior old-timer from MS to weigh in on their blog about this, and similar/adjacent problems that arise from working across such a colossal entity.
It’s a wonder they ever release anything new, if I’m being completely honest. The amount of governance, hoops, process and procedure across every aspect of their business must be staggering.
If the existence of a domain/subdomain is considered sensitive information, then something has gone very wrong.
Spam filters.
Same with third party services, sometimes they used one for something for a while and collected customer or user data there and then stopped but kept paying for it, and forgot they had it. We typically found these through analysis of their accounting.
For the past week, my Microsoft authenticator has been pinging about sign-ins from random places. Except the login history page is completely empty. Not even my own sign ins show up.
Now, you would be forgiven for thinking it's because my password leaked, but no. The default sign in flow with the app enabled is email + authenticator. No password required. In their eternal intelligence this option is not changeable in the app.
Microsoft really should realize that the only reason the account still exists is because they bought Minecraft and stop complicating my life.
I'm not sure this is the same type of issue but found this interesting, especially since apparently it's been reported to MS and no action has been taken.
Who to contact? How to make Google stop? Where to report the abuse of their services? I can't find out. The whole service is basically a big <bleep> off and "we don't want any contact."
Maybe I also need to publish some article, so it can be published here on HN? Maybe that could give it some traction for someone at Google to look into it?
I submitted an account that sent phishing emails last week, but I’m told it’s basically a black hole and to not expect anything anything to happen.
This is a failure on PayPal’s email template that the freeform text field appears just as legit as other items. The text label was something like “Message from Sender”.
This is a somewhat common pattern in scams - abusing freeform text fields in emails or other messages to give the impression that a message is coming from a source that didn't intend to send it.
Another variant I've seen is malicious URLs linking to search engines which display the user's search terms, e.g. a link to a Microsoft site search with a prefilled search of "YOU HAVE A VIRUS, CALL MICROSOFT SUPPORT 555-1212".
That's not a misconfiguration, that's incompetence.
How do these people get hired?
Do other email providers penalize that specific domain only, or all microsoft domains to a tiny degree?
Typically it's a mis-placed feature. Something like "send an email alert when a thing happens" and they let you control what goes in the message body as well as who the message should be sent towards. Sounds reasonable on the surface, but without guardrails it lets folks send arbitrary emails from your domain.
Imagine this is some truly errant copilot instance truly embracing its slop destiny.
lol