Adobe getting hacked
Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
191–200 of 444 posts
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#192I've done this for a very long time. Practically all my spam is sent to my CPAN (Perl module archive) address. Which indicates that it's just the thing that's most easily harvested.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#193If the spammers knew about FOIA requests they could harvest a gold mine. Our attorney general was conducting a training session about FOIA compliance--I worked at a community college. I raised my hand and asked if I had to respond to requests for the email addresses for all of our students. The answer was the same, comply as quickly as possible.
IANAL but pretty sure that protecting personally identifying information almost always trumps FOI.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#194Just as a heads up, Zillow will ban your account if you use zillow@domain for violating their terms. Happened to me in March 2021.
Related but nowhere near as severe, Samsung prevents you from creating an account with the email address samsung@domain. It showed a generic error message so I couldn't figure out why I couldn't create an account until I tried using a different email address.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#195I have a primary mail (me@mydomain.tld) I use for normal communication and as a fallback in case the catch-all subdomain is rejected (some companies don't like them; or are inconsistent for which form/account they allow it and for which not - I'm looking at you, Deutsche Post/DHL!). The remainder goes to *@subdomain.myotherdomain.tld.
I still get a lot of spam on my primary mail, I'm pretty sure it has been leaked by breaches and from friend's address books. My spam folder contains mail for these services: btc-e, bitcoinforum, Heroes of Newerth, hearthpwn, hifi-manuals.com, gcc-bugzilla. Most of these have been breached (for HoN I even recall it was during their early alpha/beta, and they did not acknowledge the breach when I informed them - they implied I must have used it somewhere else and that it got leaked from there). On the GCC bugzilla the address might be visible (at least to logged in users), so that's probably scraping. The hifi-manuals is pretty fresh, but IIRC they have been breached shortly after that.
A lot of businesses know both business@catchall and paypal1234@catchall, but I'm happy to say that I have not yet noticed 3rd party spam on these. Same for real life encounters for which I used the catchall (though the look on sales people is often priceless). However, aliexpress is pretty annoying with their own spam, as are some other retailers.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#196After using this technique for 4 years, only Reddit so far!
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#197I used to. Stopped doing it as it was too much hassle to keep track of, but the biggest spammers were tech recruiters. I think some of them post fake jobs just so they can harvest your email address when you apply. Then that email address gets passed around on various lists for years.
Hasn't LinkedIn pretty much replaced this? I get recruiters on LinkedIn all the time, but very few if any on my personal email.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#198Just as a heads up, Zillow will ban your account if you use zillow@domain for violating their terms. Happened to me in March 2021.
Did this happen instantly? I just now created an account. So far nothing happened. Maybe this is a ploy to get people to sign up.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#199Hostmonster (a Bluehost brand) have been the worst, since they were so blatant about it. I'd only had legitimate correspondence to that address, until the week I cancelled my account, and since then the spam has been relentless. So as part of my account cancellation, they clearly sold my email address on.
The most amusing was the UK Parliament petitions site, since you would have thought they were a bit more careful with the email addresses given to them.
But the strangest is the persistent use of specific email addresses that I've never used anywhere - about half a dozen common forenames, and one forename-plus-three-numbers. I've no idea where they originally came from - perhaps someone padding out their email lists for sale with semi-randomly generated ones? - but that set of addresses has been used and reused for over a decade. At least it makes it easy for me to train spam filters, since even novel emails are easy for the filters to spot when multiple copies arrive together.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#200Ticketmaster gave one of my email addresses to their parent company, Live Nation. They started spamming me with event stuff pretty much immediately. Their unsubscribe options don't work. I complained to their support and they told me to just not use it, and that the emails would go away? Screw that, I changed the email address I used for Ticketmaster and deleted the original one. No more spam since, thankfully, so it seems they didn't pass the new address along.
The one that puzzles me is that some recruiting database got my personal email address, the one I only give out to people I care to keep in touch with. I've never, ever given that email address to a recruiter! I asked them how they got that email, and of course they just said "some AI-powered recruiting tool we use". It's sad because that email address is super fun and I had managed to keep it private for so long...