Any of the Kickstarter projects I've participated in. I used an alias for my Kickstarter account and I know for a fact that at least one of those projects sold my email because now I get random Kickstarter-type project emails in my spam folder.
Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
401–410 of 444 posts
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have had this happen to me as well. It was pretty annoying. Somebody used my name for a Twitch account. I wanted to do things the 'right way' so I didn't verify the email, didn't log in and change their password -- I contacted customer support instead (mostly just to see how it would work -- I have a very unusual name, so this is a kind of rare event for me). It took them, I think, years to delete the thing. I've n…
If the only identifier on the account is your email address then: - The account effectively belongs to you anyway. - The person who created it isn't going to be able to recover it if they lose their password, better they know about this sooner than later by you locking them out.
I don't think the first one is actually obvious. An account was set up. It is on Twitch's computers, and it has a password designed to keep me out. Twitch thinks they have allowed in some other person (who's agreed to their licensing agreements, etc). It seems to me that I'd be circumventing their account system using the fact that I happen to control the password recovery mechanism.
I mean this is essentially silly, because almost certainly what has happened (given my weird name that nobody would normally stumble across) is that my email address has become listed in some database and somebody has decided to use it to sign up for services for shady reasons. So I'm not arguing that I couldn't have gotten away with it. Definitely I could have. But I think it is an interesting reflection on these signup systems and how they might interact with the CFAA, that this weird situation can occur.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#403I do not have a "catch-all"; I have a single domain which I set up a separate email address for each correspondent, which I must manually add to /etc/aliases to accept mail at that address; anything send to an address not listed there will be rejected.
I do not think I ever received any spam.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#404123rf.com was 100% hacked or breached. Received SPAM on a really old account which I do not use, unique email address and from one day to another it was daily SPAM.
Yep, got the alert for that one: https://haveibeenpwned.com/PwnedWebsites#123RF
And there it goes all to the Spam Folder into Nirvana :D
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. Ends up making me regret donating at all, which someone has to realize would be the end result, right?
I think this is a two-party problem? Due to the polarity, people (as a mob) are 'forced' to back their party regardless of how scummy the affiliated actors act. Your regret means nothing because you probably still won't vote for another party and they already have as much of your money as you are willing to give. They can continue to harvest funds with these dark patterns with no cost - and they will find some whales…
> I think this is a two-party problem?
No, it's a problem with the CAN-SPAM act.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Could you set up a separate app for contacts (and other stuff that you want to isolate) that others cannot see, in order to prevent it?
I heard that there is indeed an option to do that, with help of some apps. You keep your real contacts list in these apps. Presumably this also means that you have special dialer and sms apps integrated with this contact list app, since otherwise you can't just tap a contact to dial or message, and would have to copy-paste phone numbers around.
Dunno what to do about messengers and such, which integrate with the contact system to show their correspondents in e.g. the ‘share’ menu. Not sure if these contacts are available to other apps—but if they are, it seems impossible to hide them.
Also there's e.g. a plugin for the (non open-source) Xposed ‘framework’, to feed fake data to apps that want to access the location and other such info. Seems to be able to fake the contacts, too, but afaiu requires a rooted phone: https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#407[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#408I 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…
Same here. I have firstname.@gmail and I keep getting emails for the non-dot variant. And to add to the frustration, in order to unsubscribe some services require you to send an email from the same address. I've never hated Gmail's "convenience" feature of ignoring dots more. If they really wanted to offer it, they should have also given the option of adding/removing dots while sending emails too.
Someone even has a Paypal account on my dot-less email. It beats me how a payments company can let somebody add an email without verification and not offer an easy to way to remove it.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#409I'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…
Also have been using catch-all with companyname@myrealname.com since 2007 and haven't had any significant problems with spam except for a brief period when a baseball player with the same name was in the news.
Reading this thread makes me feel lucky!
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#410BoA. I know it for a reason similar to unique email.
When I first came to the US I opened a BoA account and they managed to misspelled my name in a unique way, may be only in the mail but not on the card, I don’t remember this detail.
Anyway, when I got promotional mail out of nowhere addressing to the same misspelling, I knew I was sold by BoA.