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

Post by nebula8804 » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 3:50 PM UTC

nonameiguess wrote: post #264

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live, the political spam appears to be crowd sourced. Rarely is the same number used more than a couple of times. Most of it is of the form "Hi, this is Robyn from the Justice Democrats. Can we rely on your vote on Tuesday for candidate so-and-so?". Asking them to stop only stops that one person from spamming. As an aside, it's interesting to see the large difference in SMS campaigning between parties. I get…

It's demographic. Almost all of my SMS and phone spam is from the GOP. For whatever reason, about 15 years ago, they started thinking I'm my grandmother when I was the process of moving across the country and stayed with her for a week, and have been relentlessly telling Dora about the downfall of America if she doesn't do something ever since. Amazingly, she is still alive, but nearly 90, and I imagine they will con…

Post by dfee » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 4:30 PM UTC

johnwalkr wrote: post #82

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 problem and at least once a week someone tries to recover the password to “their” email address. I’ve gotten unlimited spam which my provider usually deals with well but sometimes there are periods of days where 5+ per hour get through. I’ve gotten dick pics and all kinds of receipts. I have hotel logins with the wrong name assigned because I could only make accounts by recovering one someone else mad…

Post by itsTyrion » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 4:40 PM UTC

gravitystorm wrote: post #199

Hostmonster (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…

Post by itsTyrion » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

itsTyrion wrote: post #396

gravitystorm wrote: post #199

Hostmonster (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…

Bluehost? Ain’t that the clowns that offer hilariously overpriced VPS'?

Post by zzo38computer » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #329

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 sp…