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Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

nytimes.com

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Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#11

Post by al_borland »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #5

It's increasingly difficult to change account's email and phone number, some services require selfie or scan of identity document. The fingerprint consisting of email and phone number is slowly becoming digital DNA.

I recently changed my email at a significant number of sites, as Gmail started to require phone numbers and was going to delete my accounts if I didn’t add one to some alternate addresses I had.

I didn’t run into the issue you mentioned, but I ran into the issue of Sony (for the PSN) telling me they wouldn’t delete a duplicate PSN account I had (conflicting with their support docs), after I waited 40 minutes to speak to someone. When I tried to bring up the support docs they ended the conversation.

I had a similar issue with Rockstar, where I ended up in captcha hell, having to solve 30 puzzles in a row for each login attempt or and again to get into areas of the site to change things. The site would not function. I got fed up to the point of wanting to delete my account. I don’t use it anyway. I did whatever the site said to do, and it said it could take up to 30 day(?). That was probably 3 months ago and I haven’t heard anything.

These two things make me uncomfortable deleting one of my Gmail accounts, so it’s still hanging out there.

Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#12

Post by crossroadsguy »

legitster wrote: post #4

An easier way to spin up emails for every account: For some email providers, if you add a "+" modifier to your email address, anything after the + will be ignored and still routed to your main email address. But email systems will still treat them as unique email addresses. (So abc123+Netflix@gmail.com and abc123+nytimes@gmail.com would both be delivered to abc123@gmail.com. This limits their ability to link your acc…

I tried this. Tried this with my domain as well. Spammers have figured this out. They start spamming random emails on my domain and since there's catch all I do receive them. Randomly generated emails from dedicated services (duck.com, HME etc) work better. I can just disable them and don't have to worry about other random emails. Handling all this on my own domain is going to cost me a lot in both money and time and that'd be a lot of headache as well. Also, almost every body worth their spice and sugar knows of that "+ thingie" on gmail.com. Just saying.

Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#14

Post by simfree »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #12
legitster wrote: post #4

An easier way to spin up emails for every account: For some email providers, if you add a "+" modifier to your email address, anything after the + will be ignored and still routed to your main email address. But email systems will still treat them as unique email addresses. (So abc123+Netflix@gmail.com and abc123+nytimes@gmail.com would both be delivered to abc123@gmail.com. This limits their ability to link your acc…

I tried this. Tried this with my domain as well. Spammers have figured this out. They start spamming random emails on my domain and since there's catch all I do receive them. Randomly generated emails from dedicated services (duck.com, HME etc) work better. I can just disable them and don't have to worry about other random emails. Handling all this on my own domain is going to cost me a lot in both money and time and…

Outsource it to a firm dedicated just to mail, like MXRoute.

Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#15

Post by superkuh »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #12
legitster wrote: post #4

An easier way to spin up emails for every account: For some email providers, if you add a "+" modifier to your email address, anything after the + will be ignored and still routed to your main email address. But email systems will still treat them as unique email addresses. (So abc123+Netflix@gmail.com and abc123+nytimes@gmail.com would both be delivered to abc123@gmail.com. This limits their ability to link your acc…

I tried this. Tried this with my domain as well. Spammers have figured this out. They start spamming random emails on my domain and since there's catch all I do receive them. Randomly generated emails from dedicated services (duck.com, HME etc) work better. I can just disable them and don't have to worry about other random emails. Handling all this on my own domain is going to cost me a lot in both money and time and…

That's a feature not a bug. Now your in-email client spam filter has a much easier time tagging spam because the same exact spam message sent to three different addresses. It works great for me. I love catch-all.

Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#16

Post by zahma »

Firefox Relay is a handy assistant to at least stymie email tracking and is neatly integrated with the browser. The free tier gets you a few masked emails that forward to your actual inbox. You can't reply through the masked email without paying, but that might not be necessary for all.

It feels like retaining some semblance of privacy is a losing battle. Data clean rooms are industry standard now and many companies happily share their bounties with others for profit. That appears to be the future along with consolidating businesses based on data-driven insights for demographics. How are these kinds of practices still legal? When does data collection and sharing become such a glaring issue that constitutional rights can be invoked in a landmark lawsuit? Or can we expect anti-trust suits to limit companies hoarding vast repositories of data?

It feels naive to ask these questions, but they're fundamental to societal health and progress, democracy, and arguably the planet.

https://relay.firefox.com/

Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#17

Post by waqf »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #5

It's increasingly difficult to change account's email and phone number, some services require selfie or scan of identity document. The fingerprint consisting of email and phone number is slowly becoming digital DNA.

Moving to another country is a nightmare because you cannot bring your phone number.

I am currently paying for a US phone number I don't meaningfully use, because it's not clear that all of my important account-holding organizations reliably support a two-factor/login confirmation strategy that isn't "US phone number".

Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#19

Post by qaisjp »

rantallion wrote: post #9
nelsonfigueroa wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like some backend code could easily strip the “+” and everything after it before saving an email to a database. Not sure how viable this is but I’ve also never tried it.

They could, but I'd be surprised if they do. Firstly, we can see that they're using the email exactly as provided (for sending, at least), else filters on the mail we receive wouldn't work. Secondly, the + trick works because it's valid in email addresses under RFC 5321 and RFC 5322 - the fact that Gmail (and others?) direct all addresses of the format 'foo+bar@gmail.com' to the mailbox of 'foo@gmail.com' is a quirk,…

I don't think spammers care if trimming the plus-alias doesn't work for some email providers.

Gmail is also pretty popular, so it's not much work to just hardcode it there.

Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It

#20

Post by legitster »

nelsonfigueroa wrote: post #6
legitster wrote: post #4

An easier way to spin up emails for every account: For some email providers, if you add a "+" modifier to your email address, anything after the + will be ignored and still routed to your main email address. But email systems will still treat them as unique email addresses. (So abc123+Netflix@gmail.com and abc123+nytimes@gmail.com would both be delivered to abc123@gmail.com. This limits their ability to link your acc…

It seems like some backend code could easily strip the “+” and everything after it before saving an email to a database. Not sure how viable this is but I’ve also never tried it.

That's the trick - not all email providers behave this way, so systems would have to throw out legitimate emails.

Also, most of the automated email systems are not as sophisticated as people think. Ours actually relies on + wildcards for internal testing.

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