Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 444 posts

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

#171

Post by usr1106 »

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…

> where all the spam comes from

The problem is the word spam. What you describe, misdirected mail from completely legal businesses is not really spam, even if it is junk for you personally.

There is aggressive marketing of very vaguely related products you have actually registered for. There is marketing of illegal products mostly using harvested addresses. There is phishing often using stolen addresses.

If you want to understand the problem as the OP obviously does just speaking of spam is not helpful.

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

#173

Post by hutzlibu »

xmprt wrote: post #147
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.

"Just trying to get an idea of if this is still happening even now."

Do you think the spammers retired? I doubt it, there is only a shift towards trying to get more phone numbers instead of email.

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

#174

Post by meinersbur »

Tevias wrote: post #154
cookiengineer wrote: post #148

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 ad…

I personally cannot confirm this for web.de For years I had been using their email service without receiving a single spam mail. Now, I do get occasionally spam but only few a month but only for the account I use a lot. For the newly created ones again no spam.

I do have a commonname@web.de and a *@mydomain catchall email addressed. Years ago I had my own email server on mydomain, but I got up to 30k spam per month which pushed me into abandoning my own email server and instead let Google be my MX, and forwarding the web.de mails to it.

Google is very successful in rejecting spam before acknowledging its reception via SMTP (probably mostly via IP blacklist) so I don't see it, the amount of spam shrank drastically. For a very long time a lot of spam came via icq@mydomain (yes, it has been a while), but nowadays almost all spam that I see comes via the @web.de address where Google cannot apply its IP blacklist because its received via web.de's servers. I know because the mydomain email server also used to forward received mails to Google, resulting in said 30k entries in the spam folder. The transition to put Google itself in the DNS record made all the difference.

I am kind-of surprised I don't see more spam coming via the catchall address. Sometimes spammers use mydomain with random local part as sender address, so I get bounces.

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

#175

Post by jansan »

caf wrote: post #33
ip26 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds more like they were trying to convince you of the need for a spam firewall :)

Nice inbox you have there... be a shame if it filled up with spam...

We are your friends.

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

#177

Post by athrowaway3z »

bunnyfoofoo wrote: post #162

Just as a heads up, Zillow will ban your account if you use zillow@domain for violating their terms. Happened to me in March 2021.

let isAdmin = email.local_part === "zillow"

We will fix this in our TOS

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

#178

Post by wyclif »

invaliduser wrote: post #164
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…

Same here. My name is very common and I have an email similar to John Smith , and I have around 10 people around the world named like me or similarly that use my email for everything. I receive, almost weekly, paid invoices, flight tickets, appointment reminders, a teen soccer club newsletter, new instagram accounts, etc anything you can imagine really. A few years ago I tried to contact some of my other selfs to ask…

My real surname isn't a common one, so I went ahead and grabbed mysurname@gmail.com in March 2004 when Evan Williams sent me a Gmail invite. But my surname is English and one that is predominately found in the UK, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. So I sometimes get invoices, signups, verifications, and other junk from someplace in Australia and those other English-speaking countries. I've also found it's a waste of time to correct it. Once an address is "out there" in the wild, it's going to get passed around.
Post reply on HN