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Why was my email leaked?

forums.dropbox.com

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Re: Why was my email leaked?

#221

Post by gokhan »

res0nat0r wrote: post #215
potatolicious wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "those people are forum moderators and not employees of Dropbox" They're official representatives of Dropbox, even if they are unpaid. Their behavior is entirely on Dropbox, and the fact that Dropbox has farmed out its customer support to unpaid amateurs is possibly a worse realization than the fact that the clueless person was not an employee.

Eh not really. They are community volunteers. The best part is that they can give free support in the forums without pay, and then when something esclates and they've done something wrong an actual employee can wash their hands of the situation (as they've done here) by stating they aren't actually employed by the company. So it's a win win for Dropbox. Free forum support for low level day to day forum chatter and ea…

That's the price of trying to provide a vital service free with some clueless, non-paid "customers". I mean, frontpage of HN with zillion upvotes and comments, after you fail to support customers.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#222

Post by belorn »

inovica wrote: post #20
ricardobeat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny. You were probably put on the free support queue, with low priority, since you're not a Pro user anymore :)

Yeah thats exactly what happened :) No other way to contact them and the account manager I dealt with hasn't responded either. Just counted and I've sent them 6 emails so far and zero response. Its such as shame as I have raved over Dropbox (partly as its Python which I also love), have 4 Pro accounts with my team and we were looking to sign up with 15 users to a Teams account. Looks like I'll be moving somewhere els…

If you don't care about using them in the future, just send a legal document requesting either reinstated service or refund. Of course, they might just then ban you for life for do so.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#223

Post by claudius »

spydum wrote: post #193
claudius wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t get any spam either, but then a short grep through my mail.log showed this: 2013-02-28T18:05:18.865406+01:00 nfc postfix/smtpd[14995]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from bl14-172-78.dsl.telepac.pt[85.247.172.78]: 504 5.5.2 : Helo command rejected: need fully-qualified hostname; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=

It is as if spammers don't even try anymore! Bogus helo is soon 1990s..

Postfix’s reject_invalid_helo_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_helo_hostname, and reject_unknown_helo_hostname really work wonders for me – but then it is only a small server with 1.5 users and a total of about 300 delivery attempts a day (85% rejected, 5% later classified as spam, 10% actual email).

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#224

Post by belorn »

tjbiddle wrote: post #44
inovica wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah thats exactly what happened :) No other way to contact them and the account manager I dealt with hasn't responded either. Just counted and I've sent them 6 emails so far and zero response. Its such as shame as I have raved over Dropbox (partly as its Python which I also love), have 4 Pro accounts with my team and we were looking to sign up with 15 users to a Teams account. Looks like I'll be moving somewhere els…

If you'd truly get a faster response being a Pro member, then it might be worth a shot to purchase Pro again - then when they respond, have them refund you and reset your account back to it's previous time left for your membership.

I really dislike this idea that if the company fail you deliver a product you have paid for, a individual should just pay them again for the same product.

Taking money and then fail to deliver service or product is the very definition of scam/theft. But beyond having the state putting down regulations, is there any actions people can do without putting themselves at even higher risk (like bans)?

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#225

Post by nwh »

LancerSykera wrote: post #219
nwh wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use something similar already. I've a domain that is used purely for my email. Normal addresses like webmaster@ are rejected. A script on the server takes the domain I am registering for a service on (eg "google.com"), generates an random-looking but deterministic address, and creates an alias for that address to my real inbox. End result is that everyone gets a unique email that can't be guessed, I can nuke an add…

A good five years ago I got two phishing emails to two unique addresses that I had used to contact a local bank. They also refused to believe me, and it was basically my fault for not securing my computer. Somehow.

Well that's terrifying.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#226

Post by tjoff »

markdown wrote: post #46

While I can't speak for Dropbox and this specific case, we had angry customers like this two or three years ago. Obviously we were very concerned, and spent days poring over server logs and trying to figure out where the breach was. Turns out the service we used for newsletters (icontact) had been hacked. They never emailed to let us know. (They had a blog post up for a few days, then removed it, the slimy bastards!)…

Sounds similar to... the dropbox hack in 2012...

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#227

Post by tjoff »

TillE wrote: post #58
tlogan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's support tends to be nonexistent rather than outright hostile. There's quite a difference.

I don't know what is more infuriating. Having some incompetent fool that I can argue with or not even being able to initiate contact.

At least the former inspires hope that it could potentially lead somewhere.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#228

Post by dcminter »

bigiain wrote: post #166
dcminter wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"they've certainly got a problem" If you mean they should sort out their forum moderation policies then I agree. If you mean that this must be a technical problem on their part then I disagree. A 3rd party submitting their address book to a Friend Finder or similar tool would not be the responsibility of DropBox.

We both agree on two points, they need to do something about their support forum, and they don't definitely have a technical problem with their site/code/security. They do seem to have a customer expectation and privacy problem though. If, as described by enough forum poster for it not to be a coincidence, email accounts created just for Dropbox's service and which are not trivially guessable are getting spammed - th…

I think you're missing the perfectly plausible use case where the user has used the Dropbox send link feature.

Note that a third party will now have the second party's email address without Dropbox being in any way culpable.

It's possible that the feature was never used but it's hardly an obscure use case.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#229

Post by Mahn »

numbsafari wrote: post #183
rhizome wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spammers can easily figure out they can just remove everything from the + sign, including the sign itself, and boom, they have my address without the specific alias. Do they in fact do this?

Yep. I know for a fact they do. Yahoo! Plus has a much better system where you use a different base email address plus the sub-address rather than your regular address. For example, if my account is "somebody@gmail.com" then you use somebody+dropbox@gmail.com. But with yahoo, you pick an alternate, e.g. "huggybear", and use that instead (huggybear-dropbox@yahoo.com). That way if a spammer seems the sub-addressed acco…

That's perfect, I wish you could do something like this in gmail without specifically creating a new account for every alias.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#230

Post by witek »

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

Box is doing a 50GB giveaway at the moment. Seems like good timing.
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