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

321–330 of 444 posts

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

#321

Post by maicro »

nulbyte wrote: post #265
dmje wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite gratifying to read that I'm not alone in this. I was really early into Gmail so have first.last@ and get a lot of stuff emailed to me that is exactly as you describe - not spam, just mistaken address. Hotel reservations, golf clubs, Republican party bullshit, hilarious copies of order receipts from gun shops... (The last one of the above I replied to - it was an order for a rifle scope. I sent what I thought wa…

I have the same with Gmail. I get lots of email for firstlast@ because someone can't be bothered to remember the numbers after their username. Then I have also gotten coffee receipts for a cardiologist (he likes Major Dickason's blend), wedding invitations, boating newsletters, and even modeling opportunities in a different country. It amazes me how many people either don't know their email address or can't imagine s…

The coffee receipts I can understand - if a shop uses Square or a similar tablet-based POS system, I could see requesting an emailed receipt, typing in the wrong email address, and then not noticing when it never arrived. Some of those systems link your email address to your payment method, so if you just hit "email receipt" every time, without double-checking and catching the typo, you (the wrong recipient) will just keep getting them.

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

#322

Post by cactusmatt »

I've been using a catch-all domain with unique addresses (example: ycombinator@mydomain) for every service/site/etc. for more than 10 years.

Surprisingly, none of these email addresses have gotten spam, outside of what the original service sends.

As someone else mentioned, most of the spam I received comes from people with the same name as me. I was an early gmail adopter and my gmail is my firstnamelastname@gmail. I get spam, people's rental agreements, dating profile information, mortgage closing papers, etc for people with my name from across the country. There is someone who has been convinced they can create a gmail with my firstname.lastmail@gmail who has signed up my account for facebook, netflix, and espn+. This is much more of a problem for me.

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

#323

Post by 7263255 »

I've been doing this for years. Very few companies have actually sold my address. Federal Express and USAA traded lists for a while.

The largest source of spam is from domain registrations and other public records.

The next largest source is from breaches: Ameritrade (they lost a backup tape), MtGox, and a bunch of small vendors over the years.

One thing that is interesting to note... when I get unwanted mail from a source I recognize, the unsubscribe links both work and do not lead to more mail. (Example, the parking vendor at the local stadium started sending me event newsletters for the stadium... but sending it from themselves, not having shared with the stadium.)

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

#324

Post by sdflhasjd »

Everyone's already named the big culprits and hacks, but I'll name a smaller one.

I tried Huel (UK soylent clone) a very long time ago, and a few years later, I started to get phishing emails to the address I used.

When I told them, they just ignored me. I'm fairly sure they were hacked or breached. The emails didn't contain any real info though, so I assume it was just their mailing list they lost.

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

#326

Post by chrisdhal »

rkuska wrote: post #311
dmje wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite gratifying to read that I'm not alone in this. I was really early into Gmail so have first.last@ and get a lot of stuff emailed to me that is exactly as you describe - not spam, just mistaken address. Hotel reservations, golf clubs, Republican party bullshit, hilarious copies of order receipts from gun shops... (The last one of the above I replied to - it was an order for a rifle scope. I sent what I thought wa…

Funny how it's always the republicans who can't get their email address right. I have similar problem, from trump watch newsletters to random local republican party emails, also received few invitations to parties, medical results, private photos from trips and the list continues. Also when the covid started I was cced on some action group that was solving the covid problem in their area. The worst thing is the spam…

Oh, it's definitely not "always the republicans", the Democrats also can't figure out their own email addresses. I routinely receive DNC and other left wing nonsense, including invites to parties, Biden fundraisers, etc. to my more "generic" (ie. first initial, last name) Gmail account. I've marked these as spam, unsubscribed, etc. and still get them because either the orgs are dumb (wouldn't be a surprise) or people keep signing up again when they don't get them to their real address.

This is an "I'm dumb and can't remember my email address" issue, not a political one.

I also get the usual run of the mill receipts, reservations, etc.

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

#327

Post by noasaservice »

kasey_junk wrote: post #289
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…

My idiot namesake signed up for his unemployment benefits with my email address. The unemployment agency in his state won’t let me change it or contact the person by mail to have them fix it. He also is down for _any_ sweepstakes and has dubious dating preferences. He’s out there wondering why he never wins anything and no one swipes on his profile.

Then "forget password" and take the account over.

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

#328

Post by galkk »

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.

Interesting. Time to get back to l33tspeak?

It is much more readable to have z1ll0w@mydomain than hashes (that was suggested above).

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

#329

Post by aasasd »

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…

> their friends' machines had malicious android apps harvesting contact addresses

Basically the majority of apps in the Play Store have permissions to see the contacts, then they vacuum up the whole address book and sell it to companies doing correlation with data from other services—and pretty much compiling giant stores of identifying info and contacts. I guess it's a given that tons of that info also falls into spammers' hands, and since almost no one in the public ever heard of these particular companies, they face zero consequences for what they're doing.

Post reply on HN