Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers? • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by gwbas1c » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:43 PM UTC

The absolute worst offender are political activists: (In the US)

I attended my town's meeting for a political party in 2016. I put my name and email on the list with an email address that I made up on the spot. It continues to get HAMMERED by every up-and-coming politician in the state who's trying to make a name for themselves.

A few years ago I attended Senator Ed Markey's roadshow for the Green New Deal. I again used a unique email address. Someone on the staff sent the address a LinkedIn invite promoting their puppet show business.

I interviewed with Microsoft in the fall of 2004 and used a unique email address on the application. It started getting SPAM. I think I blocked it in my email provider.

Looking in my SPAM folder, most of the spam is going to my gmail account, and most of it is recruiter spam. (There are a lot of recruiters who just SPAM, and I report them.) But: I have 2 emails in German to an email address I used with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View probably sometime between 2005-2007.

Speaking of resume spam: Next time I publish a resume I'm going to do "jobboard_year@...". I'm getting hammered with resume spam, a lot of it from recruiters who either haven't read my resume, have poor comprehension, or hit send with glaring errors.

Years ago I blocked a bunch of addresses in my email provider that I never used. (I'm not going to look them up now.) They were very random, but somehow they just kept getting emails. I have no idea why.

And finally: In 2003 I put out a resume with "resume@..." That got hammered with SPAM. A repeat offender was someone trying to sell a car detailing franchise. I had to block that address.

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

#332

Post by soared » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

The us government. Register to vote? Change your address? Register a new vehicle?

Drown in very well targeted spam containing personal information like your name, the vehicle you purchased, the dealership you bought it from, your address, family members names, etc.

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

#333

Post by aasasd » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

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.

Pretty much vast majority of apps in Play Store have permissions to see the contacts—they vacuum up the whole address book and sell it to companies doing correlation with data from other services. This only became worse as ‘big data’ was popularized and the value of this personal info dawned on more people.

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

#334

Post by mbreese » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:44 PM UTC

jonahbenton wrote: post #309

johnklos wrote: post #296

There have been plenty of small companies, but the ones that have been most egregious are Adobe and Avid. Adobe are just a bunch of idiots who have no clue what they're doing. There's a whole story, but let's just summarize by saying they have people working for them who both want to argue about how it's "not possible", yet have zero insight in to how their data is stored. I couldn't get anyone at Avid to listen even…

Adobe for 20+ years has been one of the largest data brokers. They know exactly what they are doing.

I thought it was just due to the (widely known) Adobe data breaches?

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

#335

Post by shagie » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

cactusmatt wrote: post #322

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…

The relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/1279/

My father has encountered this a fair bit. He was able to get a one of the most prolific incorrect email address users to realize their mistake when they used his email address while purchasing a house in England and he was able to contact the realtor to get back to the person misusing the address and correct the email address.

There's still someone who has emirates frequent flier miles associated with his email address that they can't use (they've forgotten the password to the account and it keeps sending the email to him - but without enough information for him to either respond back or identify the account to have it corrected).

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

#336

Post by cactusmatt » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #49

mynegation wrote: post #39

Ah, finally, my time to shine. Amazingly - not too many, given that I use hundreds of unique emails. Tbh this confuses the hell out of people when I give a CSR at AcmeBoutique the address AcmeBoutique@myowndomain.com The offenders that I remember: - Men’s Health magazine - local gym - online flower shop - agency that at the time handled visa applications for a local Indian consulate - couple of infoproducts from Prod…

I once had a irate business owner call me after I placed an order, demanding to know why their business name was in my e-mail address. After I explained it: "That's pretty clever."

I also use my catch all to create unique "business" email addresses. The best encounter I had was giving my email address to retail person at a store and having them mistake me for an employee and give me the corporate discount. They asked me why I hadn't mentioned I worked for bigcompany@mydomain.

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

#337

Post by mattmcknight » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

cactusmatt wrote: post #322

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…

My early adopter short gmail address has a similar issue. With password reset by email, it seems like a really bad idea to use it for your bank account, amazon, etc. when I can just reset your password and login.

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

#338

Post by jnwatson » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:47 PM UTC

I’ve been using @ for over 20 years.

Perusing my spam folder, adobe is the worst but still less than 10%. Most match the leaks listed in haveibeenpwned.com.

I really need to put sales@ and root@ on my blocklist.

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

#339

Post by gwbas1c » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

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 once got someone's COVID test results. I called their doctor immediately and when they acted confused, I quickly told them that they could get in a lot of trouble for HIPA violations because they sent me so much personal information.

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

#340

Post by ectopod » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 1:48 PM UTC

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 same issue. I do wonder if it's sometimes people who don't have an email address, or don't want to share it. A company insists so they give the obvious gmail address, which is actually mine.