161–170 of 265 posts
I don't understand why the mods were so quick to defend DB, especially since they don't appear to have access to any privileged info. Dropbox has over 200 employees now and whatever precautions they take an occasional slip-up seems entirely possible.
Sean B.: Hi there, We’ve been looking into these spam reports and take them seriously. Back in July we reported that certain user email addresses had leaked and some users had received spam as a result. At this time, we have not seen anything to suggest this is a new issue, but remain vigilant given the recent wave of security incidents at other tech companies. If you’ve received spam to an email account you only use…
There was nothing in that thread that requires moderation (other than the mods themselves)... so why are they even there?
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Yup, especially Chris' behaviour is a no go. I don't know how the mods are affiliated with dropbox but if they are employees I wouldn't let them have any customer contact at all.
Sounds like they're volunteers, not employees: https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=97303&page=2#pos...
On a side note, why the heck does dropbox have volunteers running their support forum? At this stage, cost savings isn't worth the reputation hit.
Unfortunately I have seen their customer service go downhill recently. Not sure if they are having capacity problems or something. 2 weeks ago I signed up for a trial of Dropbox Teams and it said that after the trial I would be dropped back to my Pro account. I cancelled the trial as had made my mind up not to do it and it dropped me to a free account. Several emails to support, the account manager I'd been provided…
From this forum "experience", it seems they have copied the Google model of service. They offer the support forum as a major source of support and promote heavy users to moderators or give them some other special flair. Mind you, normal users, without any inside access, information or capabilities. These users then spend their time flagging down support requests and blaming the posters.
The bit where Andy Y. says, "Oh, some spammer just guessed it" was funny. As if spammers needed to do dictionary attacks against the sort of tagged addresses that 0.1% of people use.
But it became hilarious when he said the same thing to the guy who uses 10-random-character tags. As if they would hit upon two different Dropbox addresses like that before the sun cooled to a cider.
The original complainant is much more patient than I am. If that's what I'd gotten as "support" on a paid service when reporting a security breach, I would have closed my account and told them to get fucked.
Brutal customer service! Especially since a user is giving you a heads up about a possible breach and leakage of their personal information. I can fathom these types of replies if this was behind closed doors, but when you have an open forum like this, you are asking for trouble with snotty replies. This forum should be a PR beacon for awesome customer support!
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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 "i…
"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.
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 - then Dropbox has somehow leaked customer data that customers had expectations of being private. If that were me, I'd consider myself to "certainly have a problem" - whether that problem is "my user database just got exposed via an SQLi attack", or "my contract with my newsletter emailing partner or customer support software service wasn't well thought through enough and they've used my clients email addresses without my/their permission".
While I agree that a 3rd party (or even a 3rd party app) uploading their addressbook is beyond Dropbox's control - that doesn't seem likely to be the cause from my reading of the first few pages of that forum thread this morning - I doubt the sort of person who creates "username.dropbox@example.com" style email addresses for Dropbox is likely to then add that address into a contact list where Facebook or Instagram style contact-mining apps are likely to find them.
It'll be interesting to see this as it pans out - I'm reasonably sure Dropbox or one of their partners (I'd put a small wager on Zendesk) or some malware targeting their client-app; is "leaking" username/emails.
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Are you affiliated with Tonido, or just really into Dropbox alternatives? Your submission history seems a little too focused.
Nice investigative work, he definitely seems affiliated...
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Sounds like they're volunteers, not employees: https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=97303&page=2#pos...
They have a title, and that must mean they have authority. Volunteers are a fine thing, but make sure the title listed has the word "volunteer" in it else they will taken for employees. On a side note, why the heck does dropbox have volunteers running their support forum? At this stage, cost savings isn't worth the reputation hit.
If I had to guess - I'd suspect three or four "nines" of their customer support workload comes from their "free tier" non-customers. (Having said that, there's evidence upthread in these HN discussions saying they're also dropping the support ball for paying, even team-account-sized paying customers - that's not OK...)
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He doesn't run a spam filter and he's using a catch all, therefore any email sent to any address on his domain will get to him. If someone was just trying things to see what worked he would see those emails.
This is not entirely true. A very large percentage of spam (70-90%) is stopped at or before the banner, at a layer he probably doesn't control (unless he runs his entire email infrastructure).
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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.
It's all fun and games until you get attacked by a spambot that tries blindly sending thousands of messages to @yourdomain.com