Talk:2822: *@gmail.com

Why not send to *@*.*? 172.69.247.45 03:08, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Either *@* suffices (if not just a *), or (because of non-standard wildcard parsing) it would reach neither <[email protected]> nor <[email protected]>... But it'd depend upon how you invoke the query of the relevent MXRecords. 172.71.178.22 03:18, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Based on the caption of the comic, I believe the real joke is that many GMail recipients of the original mass email would incorrectly use the "Reply-All" functionality of their email client and thereby further bomb the gmail server with a much larger volume of emails. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 03:21, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

That's certainly part of it, but getting millions of emails is far more annoying than the typical few. DownGoer (talk) 04:44, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

I have a setup to shorten mail notifications and "XKCD: *.gmail.com" totally looks like something it could output as the sender name, so for a moment I got very confused why the latest comic was suddenly sent from a GMail address and with no subject. Fabian42 (talk) 05:51, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Add to this the unfortunate tendency to promote Top-Posting (I'm looking at you, Outlook Express, but the various successors and competitors over the last three decades need not have followed that most unconventional convention too!) and 'email chains' of nested replies so easily build up in volumes that never would if each sender were encouraged to actually read through the prior chain of messaging (perhaps realise their contribution was unnecessary, given what someone already else said two iterations ago!) and judiciously prune out the historic ">>>>..."ed contributions that they aren't replying to.
It also lets you mid-post (respond to a paragraph/point immediately after that embedded paragraph/point, to skip and excising later points intelligently) and stops it from becoming a hige hidden upside-down tree of everything in that message's history. (Which can also be a different problem... Something might have been said early on that might be best not to repeat to a later "copied in" contributor, for security or even politeness reasons, but now it's there to be discovered.)
But, instead, the modern solution is to hide these top-post tree-roots behind client-side "collapsed"-content and keep forwarding all historic context unless someone takes time to scroll down-down-down from their "Yeah, I agree" simple response and snip the "..."-worthy stuff out (as well as many, many repetitions of "Please don't print this email out if you don't have to", "This email is intended only for the stated recipients", "The views of this sender do not necessarily reflect the views of his company", etc, often adding up and combining into .sig additions much larger than their respective senders' contributions). Plus an often confusing attempt to "threadify" multiple received messages, which (done right) would actually do better than the retention of a full and unexpurgated reply tree within Every. Single. Individual. Email!
...can you tell that I've been annoyed about this for pretty much almost thirty years? And it really hasn't been made any better over the last decade or so. 172.71.178.153 12:16, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Inevitably someone would reply all with "Me too" to *@aol.com Rtanenbaum (talk) 13:15, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

I don't see any implication in the comic of "attempting to expand the resulting lists within the mail body of the above email"; I just read it as the user typing that literally, like someone might write "I'm looping in sales@" instead of "I'm looping in the Sales Team" - they're not expecting the client to do anything magic with the body of their e-mail, just explaining what they've typed into the To / CC box. - IMSoP (talk) 14:14, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Looked to me like invoking some scripting language. e.g. "loop <address> in (*@outlook.com, *@yahoo.com) do add_address(_To_,<address>)", or somesuch according to required syntax, but I also didn't know whether this script fragment was supposed to be parsed/expanded/invoked/exec()ed within the To: or Body: fields.

I suppose "looping in" could well be a synonym for "copying in" (perhaps implicitly not "Cc:ing in", but adding to To: field), but I've not been aware of that precise terminology so that's probably why I too defaulted to thinking it's some sort of macro command being invoked at some level (despite there being few such mechanisms established to do so).

But, if you're more sure/correct than the prior editors apparently were, go ahead and edit it... 141.101.68.99 16:36, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

On another note, a notable real-life incident involving this was in the UK National Health Service, involving a distribution list of 1.2 million users! - IMSoP (talk) 14:14, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

A relatively famous Perl programmer had a legal, deliverable email address of *@qz.to, and has retained the * for his current email. I have an auto-reply bot at fred&[email protected] as a demonstration to anyone that it's a legal address but often rejected by stupid regexen. RandalSchwartz (talk) 23:28, 31 August 2023 (UTC)