241–250 of 444 posts
if you use the name+tag@gmail.com trick to tag the business or website where your are using that email
can't a scraper remove all +tag portions using a regex and send spam email directly to plain email address
you won't know the source of the leak if that happens
businesses can themselves do this if they deliberately want to sell or misuse your info
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 mostly get signed up for newsletters but I do actually have the name and address of one of the people who uses my email address. I know its not exactly polite and didn't want to be mean and cancel any orders but I mayyy have logged in and changed her name on the delivery address to "stop using my email address please" and she's never done it again.
theres also a teenager at a school in the US using my email address on social media I get a lot of requests to send me freebies!
I also apparently have an espn account now, if I liked sports I'd be taking advantage of that one!
Even weirder was one time I had RSVP's to a wedding. The couples name was exactly the same as my partners and I's! I had to email the pastor and say I think you have the wrong email address!
I've had blood test results, graduation photos, I get emails from this girls doctors. I've contacted them so many times to say I'm not your patient but they don't listen. I also know what car she leases! At this point she must have realised!?
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 was getting some dude's email for about 7 years. Started with newsletters and discussion threads for a journalism guild and a teacher's union. I found that amusing and left it, but one day emailed whoever was in charge and let them know I'm not the intended recipient. Stopped for a while and then it started again and I ignored it. But in the last few years I started getting hotel reservations, golf course membershi…
I sent a few emails to his family explaining this, they told me that I was wrong. I gave up and just ignore all of those emails.
It's on gmail and I don't use gmail for important things anyway...
I worked for a company who's mailing list ended up being leaked to spammers.
Our (otherwise seemingly legit) mailing service we used for our opt-in-only mailing list got breached.
We got lots of irate customers (there are surprisingly many people who use catch-alls), the mailing list provider put up a blog post saying "they were investigating" with no followup, and suddenly month later they redesigned their blog and the old post was gone...
waltr2@ wemo@ elara@ curse@ gizmodo@ lastfm@ macheist@ monster@ myspace@ skillshare@ dropbox@ meetup@ dribble@
And digitalocean because their unsubscribe page didn't work. If they won't stop sending, I will stop receiving.
side question: if you use the name+tag@gmail.com trick to tag the business or website where your are using that email can't a scraper remove all +tag portions using a regex and send spam email directly to plain email address you won't know the source of the leak if that happens businesses can themselves do this if they deliberately want to sell or misuse your info
I usually go about this now by having a dedicated domain for only EMail with a catch-all configured (Fastmail, Protonmail at least for Pro users allow this). That's great because everytime I'm required to provide an email for no reason at all for example hotel checkins i can just come up with a new one on the fly: hotelname2020@example.com
Bonus points for also preventing credential stuffing in case they get their badly secured passwords compromised too.
I don't have the numbers to back this up right now, but 90% of my spam comes from scraping my email from public documents, Github or one-off webshop purchases.
Is there a good provider which does this well and lets you manage the mail to each alias without logging out and in to each account?
I could see how self hosting with something like mail-in-a-box could do this, but requires a ton of knowledge and maintenance. It would be easy to just set up multiple gmail accounts, but a nightmare to manage after a while.
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 tried finding the numerous people throughout the world with the same name and surname as me and notifying them and asking them kindly to update their contacts or to stop using mine (name.surname@gmail scenario), some work, some don't.
At some point I even started canceling their appointments/subscriptions/closing their accounts, hoping they'd stop but apparently no use. Not a month passes without a few of these emails popping up in my inbox. The most annoying are when I am stuck in a group email with multiple recipients that are replying all.