Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

news.ycombinator.com

111–120 of 444 posts

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#111
post #45

Reposting from https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=30980625 tl;dr: Used a burner email signing up for Comcast Xfinity and have been constantly receiving phishing emails on that address. (Last one was this morning.)

Second this, I have a unique address I used only for Xfinity actively receiving spam.

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#112
In my list I have: Canva, Splunk and SublimeText.

I made some noise on Reddit about the Splunk one and I didn't receive anything else after a quick exchange with them, I reported the SublimeText one but a couple of years later I got other spam to this address, and I didn't bother doing anything with the Canva one.

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#113
I have no idea but I'm super annoyed my main email that I've used for almost 20 years has suddenly attracted a ton of spam.

I have a separate email account for all the trivial and unimportant website sign-ups (which I can mostly ignore since it's nothing critical), but my mail account was only used for "higher risk" accounts. I assume it was a leak of some sort (insurance or utilities).

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#114
Amazon sold me out, because I bought a flight ticket using Amazon India once. Amazon's partner was cleartrip, so I started getting spam from ClearTrip on my amazon@ email address. I complained loudly to Amazon, which didn't care much.

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#115
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HAHAHA Same but it was in the store of Sixt (a european car renting firm)

This has happened to me too, though not at Sixt. "Do you work for our company?"

Its to the point now that unless the email address is @hotmail or @yahoo, almost everybody assumes that there is some company named domain.com that that said owner of the email works for that company.

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#116
These days I mostly use unique addresses, unique passwords, and where possible MFA to secure my accounts. Reduces the risk of brute force attacks and other weak account compromises.

Historically though my intention was to track who sold my email address and combat spam. It worked great.

The most notable one was the address I registered with ISC2 when signing up to take (and pass) the CISSP in 2002. The unique address I gave ISC2 and only ISC2 in 2002 was used to send spam and scam email not long after.

It was a fairly common occurance in the early/mid-2000's to receive spam where I registered addresses. These days it seems to happen much less.

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#117
post #23

I mostly use one single address, but I can tell you exactly where all the spam comes from: idiots whose name is the same as mine. They give my address as if it belonged to them. Probably they created addresses like narag33@server and they believe that it's narag@server instead. So not only I receive all the spam from dubious sites that they suscribed to, but also their legitimate mail from lists and friends. My names…

I get random invoices in languages I don't even speak due to something similar.

Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

#120
For me the biggest "dog that did not bark" was real estate agents. I used both a separate email and VoIP number to my main one, which was handy as it meant I could switch them off at times when I didn't want to deal. I got plenty of calls and emails during the process, but as soon as I made a transaction, crickets. To the extent that I think they must share a negative list. I guess they value their own time and know that once you made a transaction, you're not going to be making another soon. Surprisingly this continues to hold, no "are you thinking of moving again" now it's been a while
Post reply on HN