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Why was my email leaked?

forums.dropbox.com

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Re: Why was my email leaked?

#131

Post by wrboyce »

inovica wrote: post #105
ISL wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, have one of your other Pro accounts raise the alarm for you.

Thats a great idea. I've been too close to this (stupid?) to even think of that. I'll get them to do that. Fingers crossed that will help, but I also feel the damage has been done in terms of my feelings towards them. I have spent part of today looking at alternatives. Thanks again

I had some issues with my Dropbox account and slow support recently (despite having a Pro account).

I managed to expedite things a bit by emailing the CEO directly -- drew@dropbox.com.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#132

Post by 0x0 »

bti wrote: post #111
jey wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a whole domain name, e.g. signup for dropbox with dropbox@tokenadult.com. You could do this with Google Apps Gmail by setting a catch-all forwarding address for the domain.

Wouldn't it be better to setup a new nickname/alias for your account? A bit tedious but then you wouldn't be getting every single xxxxx@example.com

Yeah, I've got postfix setup so I just need to add a line to a textfile with "servicename.somerandomchars[1]@mydomain" and it's starting to route to my inbox.

When an address is "compromised" and starts to receive spam, I move the line to a "banned_recipients" file with an SMTP reject header listing the new email. That way, a human using an old address would get a bounce back with the new email.

[1] so that the argument about bruteforcing "common-service@domainname" can be avoided

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#133

Post by bigiain »

__david__ wrote: post #122
ios84dev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I changed my mail server to accept . instead of +'s so now the emails I generate work through pretty much any validation.

I've also done that and I've just recently added _ to the mix, which I think is particularly devious and wholeheartedly recommend.

These (the dot and underscore separators) are a great solution, because when the spam-happy-marketroids try to get the webdevs to intentionally implement broken email address validation, they can point out all the corporate email addresses which are by-policy of the form "firstname.lastname@domain.tld"…

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#135

Post by paulhauggis »

tlogan wrote: post #19
xer0x wrote: post #13

Holy crap Dropbox's moderators make me want to terminate my account with them.

I call this "Google effect". Some companies started to think they can have crappy customer support because Google's support is crappy and Google is doing great. Actually Google is doing great despite their crappy support.

Amazon is even worse, especially for their sellers. They really don't care about their sellers at all and use bots/autoresponders for virtually all support.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#136

Post by bigiain »

dcminter wrote: post #68
username3 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people he shared folders with could have been compromised.

Entirely possible. The moderator's handling of this issue was pitifully bad but the assumption that Dropbox MUST be at fault here is ridiculous.

Dropbox may or may not be "at fault", but they've certainly got a problem. Even if the root cause turns out to be a common rootkit/trojan/botnet has started extracting and reporting email addresses from Dropbox clients on exploited customer machines, that's still a problem for Dropbox (and their customers) even though few people would call Dropbox "at fault" in that circumstance.

And, the mods there held on to the "it must be your fault, probably just an easily guessable email address + random bad luck" line _way_ past the point of credibility.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#137

Post by bconway »

Mahn wrote: post #22

I just checked the spam folder of a gmail account I used for dropbox. Throughout the years I'd ocasionally (maybe once every two months or so) check the spam folder merely out of curiosity, but it was practically always empty. Perhaps this is just a huge coincidence but I see three spam emails sent today plus another two sent this week. Some of them have cc recipients which seem legit addresses of other people, but I…

Same. I rarely check the recipient addresses in my spam folder, but today there was a LinkedIn-style phishing email to my Dropbox-specific address.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#139

Post by badgar »

benologist wrote: post #121
acoleman616 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coincidence that it came (relatively) right on the heels of "and you're on HN"...?

A bunch of employees probably saw it here first... if you worked there would you prefer to hang out on their support site or HN?

If you're an engineer, HN. If you're responsible for keeping users happy, the support site. But as usual, it seems the only people employed at Dropbox responsible for keeping users happy is the damage control department.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#140

Post by GhotiFish »

signed0 wrote: post #96
saraid216 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might consider just picking one or two random words from the dictionary.

That sounds like a fun idea for an app/service. You provide it with your base email address or custom domain and it generates a couple random words and keeps track of what service you used it to sign up for.

I spent a little time thinking about this concept and how it relates to just having dummy account you control, for giving to services you don't fully trust.

As long as you use a secure password, and you don't use the same one. I don't see alot of difference, but the ability to sandbox each service to a list of email accounts, so that the attacker never knows the master account, would be an extra layer of security.

Utility exists here. I just don't think there's enough utility to justify the work.

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