mail.com redirect problem

From: Fey, Rodolfo Christian (Rodolfo.Feyat_private)
Date: Wed Oct 06 1999 - 15:24:41 PDT

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    Hello all!
    
    I don't know if somebody reported something like that before. Sorry if so...
    
    
    Everybody can create an anonymous email account at mail.com (like hotmail or
    yahoo mail). If you create an account and then you subscribe this account to
    an email list (like bugtraq =)), you will get a message to confirm your
    subscription. This is fine, and thanks that, you cannot subscribe *another*
    email address to a list.
    So, you subscribe your new account to many (many, many) lists and you
    confirm your subscriptions. Soon you will start to receive tons (and tons,
    and tons) of emails.
    
    Where is the problem? OK. Mail.com let's you redirect your messages to
    another account. You simply need to give another's email address (any
    address, you don't need to give an mail.com address), and the whole emails
    will be redirected to this account. The real problem is that no confirmation
    is needed, so the victim will start to receive unsolicited emails and he
    can't do anything!
    
    Not only this; the messages which are forwarded *doesn't* stay in the
    subscribed account's inbox... this means that the attacker doesn't needs to
    clean periodically the inbox...
    And more... From the victims point of view, the messages are sent directly
    from the distribution lists, not from the subscribed account! (of course,
    you can check the header and there you will see that the message was sent to
    another address and then redirected).
    
    
    I haven't tested this on other free webmail services, but I imagine that
    there are more webmail services with the same problem...
    
    
    > FEY, Rodolfo Christian
    > II - IS
    >
    



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