Why do thousands of U.S. military emails keep getting sent to a country in Africa?

Just another reason to proofread your emails. It turns out, thousands of emails intended for members of the U.S. military, some containing sensitive information, have accidentally been sent to the African country of Mali over the last decade due to typos.

This is because the U.S. military uses the “.MIL” domain while Mali uses “.ML.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people were missing the “I” when typing in the email address for someone in the U.S. military. The problem was recently brought to light by Johannes “Joost” Zuurbier, a Dutch Internet entrepreneur whose company was hired to manage the “.ML” domain. That contract ended last week, prompting Zuurbier to raise awareness of the problem in the media.

As a precaution, the Department of Defense has blocked all its email accounts from being able to send messages to the “.ML” domain. However, the root of the problem is people using personal email accounts like Google’s Gmail or Yahoo!, which don’t have this protection, as well as outsiders or third parties sending emails to government accounts.