Cory Solovewicz receives more unwanted emails than you. Seriously—it’s a lot more. Since December 2024, one of the domains at which he receives email has registered 401,796 messages—by his calculations that’s an average of 699.99 pings per day.

This deluge isn’t the regular flood of spam, newsletters, and unwanted deals that fill many people’s inboxes. Instead, companies and other organizations are inadvertently sending Solovewicz other people’s private information and company secrets. Over the last few years, he’s received injury reports from a city government, confirmation of people’s pizza orders, and account setup emails from a school platform.

“I get service orders for people that need repairs. I get lots of test platform credentials,” says Solovewicz, a security researcher and consultant. Solovewicz is receiving the avalanche of messages as he’s the owner of the domains noreply.us and noreply.net, which he purchased in 2020 and 2024 respectively.

After originally planning to use the noreply.us domain as a catch-all email—to filter messages and enhance his privacy—he quickly noticed that other systems were sending mail to @noreply.us addresses. “I created an accidental honeypot,” Solovewicz tells WIRED. “I had no idea it was going to turn into this.” Companies may send emails to [companyname]@noreply.net or similar variations believing they aren’t going anywhere, or could not be monitored in any way.

Broadly it’s also possible that they may transform a person’s individual email address to send to one of these placeholder style domains if someone leaves a company or deletes their account. What started out as a personal email project has become a large-scale effort to warn businesses and other groups that they have misconfigured their internal systems and are accidentally sharing sensitive information.