I was looking for the email address of a few profiles on GitHub and came across the no-reply email IDs. I know that these email IDs are created to make our personal email private, but I was wondering what happens if we mail to that no-reply address, I tried to mail me with my friend's email account and didn't receive any error neither did I receive the mail in my inbox. So what happened to that mail?
1 Answers
If you try to send mail to that domain, it will be returned as undeliverable.
In order to send mail to a domain, that domain must have either one or more MX records that provide the names of hosts to which mail can be delivered, or one or more A or AAAA records pointing to hosts which have a mail server running. In this case, users.noreply.github.com has no MX records, and it is a CNAME for github.github.io, which points to hosts which do not run a mail server.
When you attempt to send a mail to a server and it can't be delivered immediately, it is usually queued by your mail server, and if it remains undeliverable after some time (by default five days), it will bounce. Normally, you will receive a bounce message from your mail server indicating that the mail wasn't able to be delivered.
The point of those addresses is to allow users to attribute their commits to the correct account without having to receive emails. It wouldn't be very useful to prevent people from sending spam (or, in some cases, hostile or abusive emails) if the addresses weren't totally undeliverable.
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