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

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

#141

Post by ornornor »

For my part:

Bell Canada (got hacked a few times, notoriously)

So. Many. ATS. (Applicant Tracking Systems)

Several small time online stores.

The first two probably got breached and the emails stolen (although I have never ever received any disclosure of being breached from any ATS ever. Small time stores they probably sold it for actual money, they weren’t exactly trustworthy in the first place.

I use spam gourmet so I know exactly where any email address was first used and thus who leaked it.

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

#142

Post by egberts1 »

skielight wrote: post #42
narag wrote: 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 have the exact same issue. My name is quite common and I registered my email address more than 15 years ago, so it looks something like @ . Now I get phone bills, internet bills, promo emails, subscription emails, two factor emails, and sometimes even bank related emails addressed to someone who shares their first name with me. It's been years now. I've reported the emails, but neither the intended recipients, not…

What I do is log into the billing account and change the email to support@billingcompanyinsertedhere.com

Never heard from them again.

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

#143

Post by 369548684892826 »

bee_rider wrote: post #138
hamburglar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not wildly unpopular with me. I’ve canceled multiple Netflix accounts using my $firstInitial$lastName@gmail account. My excuse if they ever challenged me would be to say I thought it was fraudulent because I didn’t set it up and I didn’t want my email to be the only contact method. Edit: there is one boost mobile customer who has done this to me and I can’t figure out the exact address they used (the thing where you…

I have had this happen to me as well. It was pretty annoying. Somebody used my name for a Twitch account. I wanted to do things the 'right way' so I didn't verify the email, didn't log in and change their password -- I contacted customer support instead (mostly just to see how it would work -- I have a very unusual name, so this is a kind of rare event for me). It took them, I think, years to delete the thing. I've n…

If the only identifier on the account is your email address then:

- The account effectively belongs to you anyway.

- The person who created it isn't going to be able to recover it if they lose their password, better they know about this sooner than later by you locking them out.

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

#146

Post by getcrunk »

janosdebugs wrote: post #144

My wife and I use an e-mail pattern of someprefix-(.*)@ourdomain.com and give each site a different "alias". It keeps out the trash, but lets us filter nicely, and also catch data leaks. So far we caught one.

What client do you use for this workflow

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

#147

Post by xmprt »

yodon wrote: post #30

When my kids were young, I set them up with two emails addresses: one for emailing friends, the other for emailing businesses. The assumption was this would protect their personal friend emails from spam. The reality was by the time they were older teens almost all the spam they received came in on their personal friend emails and almost none of it came on their commercial-use addresses. My assessment was businesses…

Could you give a rough time period for when you set up their accounts and how old the accounts are now? Just trying to get an idea of if this is still happening even now.

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

#148

Post by cookiengineer »

In Germany there are lots of freemail providers. Some of them sell all the contact data to spammers:

- web.de

- gmx.de/net/com

I reproduced this with a new domain, a nowhere occuring email on an email server that does not list its accounts via imap, and a single email from those services to the new email was enough to receive spam afterwards; even when the email wasn't listed anywhere on the web.

On a couple other addresses they receive spam mostly from Ghana, Botswana, or rural Delhi, so they're easy to identify. I keep the reddit-trained reply NLP bot active to reply to spammers and keep em busy.

At some point I might go the offensive route, cause they always seem to use standard software on outdated Windows machines, with couple of aliases of Western sounding names (well, at least in their own imagination).

My opsec mandates that I split up email addresses by security level and purpose, and the emails aren't related anyhow, don't use the same name and are basically random emails that cannot be correlated. I'd also encourage everyone to use a password manager and use only random passwords everywhere to prevent account stuffing or stupid script kiddies trying to compromise your accounts.

If there's one thing the BreachCompilation has taught me it's that every humanly chosen password is based on patterns and/or easily gathered social structures that surround them on a daily basis.

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

#150

Post by bestnameever »

2bluesc wrote: post #84
narag wrote: 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 had an entire Comcast account registered to someone with the same name in another part of the state that took me years to get rid of. Could even login with my email address because he registered it to my account and somehow the email side stepped verification. Imagine dealing with Comcast customer support. Then imagine not even being a customer anymore trying to get this resolved. Now imagine explaining how you're…

I've had this with credit card accounts. It usually gets settled pretty quickly when I escalate it to fraud or security.
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