What Does the V- Stand for in Microsoft Email Addresses
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MS is such a big vendor, it is important for everyone working in IT to be aware that microsoft.com email domain is not exclusively for the use of MS employees. Vendors that do business with MS, under certain circumstances, can purchase email addresses at Microsoft's domain. To ensure no one mistakes them for actual Microsoft employees or representatives, these addresses are supposed to be prefixed with a v- (vee dash.)
In the real world of Windows administration, almost all contact you will ever have from the microsoft.com domain will be these vendors. These are the vendors that run the audit scams, software update scams, and so forth. They aren't supposed to lie, but lying makes MS a lot of money so be prepared that they will push the truth as far as they can and normally, just lie.
Basically, assume any and all emails that come from microsoft.com are always a scam, but if they are prefixed with a v-, they are absolutely, definitely, always a scam. Because it means that a non-MS vendor is hiding their identify from you and pretending to be part of Microsoft when they are not. That alone, no matter what else they say, means you are starting the conversation on dishonest footing. If the vendor was honest and wanted to do legitimate business with you, they would not pretend to be someone that they are not. It's that simple.
On Microsoft's part, they never claim the emails are employees, that's not how email works, and they require a prefix that is well known to flag these emails. So they excuse the money making behaviour in that it is easy to verify the emails aren't from MS themselves, and they never claimed that they were. People just make assumptions, and that's on them.
Being an MS customer means more than anything, understanding how MS works, communicates and licenses before learning the tech. The more you know.
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I thought we had a thread about this in the past as well. But absolutely a good reminder.
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@JaredBusch said in What Does the V- Stand for in Microsoft Email Addresses:
I thought we had a thread about this in the past as well. But absolutely a good reminder.
Probably did, but my guess is that it was a discussion in a thread, rather than an easy to find topic of its own.
Had several people have to deal with this today and, of course, no one believes me until they Google it and are like "oh, Scott didn't make this up!" lol.
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Could you please update the post with one or two examples of how a "scam" address would look?
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@Pete-S said in What Does the V- Stand for in Microsoft Email Addresses:
Could you please update the post with one or two examples of how a "scam" address would look?
one was posted here 2 years ago.
https://mangolassi.it/post/510522 -
@Pete-S said in What Does the V- Stand for in Microsoft Email Addresses:
Could you please update the post with one or two examples of how a "scam" address would look?
Also here
https://mangolassi.it/post/525507 -
@JaredBusch Yup, and they want to do a audit of devices using a deployment tool that is not even a Microsoft one.
