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Why was my email leaked?

forums.dropbox.com

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Re: Why was my email leaked?

#171

Post by semanticist »

minm wrote: post #167
matznerd wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice investigative work, he definitely seems affiliated...

I am offering an alternative suggestion to a person who is not happy with dropbox's customer service. He/she has the smarts to decide whether a new service is worth a try. My affiliation is irrelevant. Can u guarantee the readers who downvoted me are not affiliated with dropbox or positively biased towards dropbox. You are no different from the dropbox forum moderators.

I downvoted you. I'm not affiliated with dropbox. Your affiliation IS relevant when promoting services, because it means it's not an honest recommendation from a happy user, it's paid shilling.

If you don't understand the difference - or more importantly why one of them bothers people and the other doesn't, you need to stop doing marketing or promotion really quickly. You're going to tarnish the brand of the product you're trying to push.

Do you want people's only lasting impression of Tonido to be 'oh, that's that company that was astroturfing Hacker News'?

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#172

Post by agwa »

0x0 wrote: post #132
bti wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 argum…

That's a nice technique; thanks for sharing it. This kind of flexibility is one of the many benefits of running your own mail server (I'm always happy to see that at least some people here are still doing that).

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#173

Post by rhizome »

Scramblejams wrote: post #153
benhalllondon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Chris seems a bit of prick: "Just the fact that you listed your emails says it all."

Looks like Chris is battening down the hatches. His linked site[1] was up about an hour ago, but it redirects to a placeholder now. Also, he's deleted all but his first comment, wish I'd taken a screenshot of his other comments. Tangentially related: It drives me nuts to deal with people whose default answers are "no," "you must be doing it wrong" and so on. Particularly the moderators who insisted someone must have…

Site appears to be up now.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#174

Post by rhizome »

Mahn wrote: post #59
danielweber wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way some people do "fredsmith+amazon@gmail.com" as proof that it must be amazon that leaks their passwords has some issues. The guy who says that he had a truly random bunch of letters as his dropbox account is probably a better indicator, but it's hard to know if the guy ever leaked it himself. Doesn't excuse the moderators being jerks, though.

Speaking of which, this alias system from google is great in theory, but kind of pointless in practice; 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.

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?

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#175

Post by viveutvivas »

codesuela wrote: post #150
paulhauggis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that actually the case? I'm a Amazon Prime user (I mention that because I buy almost everything from Amazon :) and I whenever I got in touch with Amazon (Germany) the support was top notch and my issue was resolved very quickly. I am just a buyer though.

Amazon customer service for their buyers is pretty great, in my experience. I broke my Kindle (stepped on it) and they sent me a brand new one, no questions asked. I've heard stories that their customer service for seller is terrible, however.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#176

Post by tlrobinson »

Why is Dropbox letting volunteer moderators represent them so poorly? Dropbox is a grown up company now, train and pay a couple people to moderate, or at least make it more clear they're volunteers not employees of the company.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#177

Post by kalleboo »

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!)…

We were also hit by the iContact breach.

We lost a lot of trust with customers since we had a kind of low-rent image to start with (discount software bundles). The worst part was they never really owned up to it - the blog post just said they were "investigating it". They never followed up, then they redesigned their site and the blog post mysteriously disappeared. Assholes.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#178

Post by badgar »

simonster wrote: post #50
lucb1e wrote: post #30

Aha, that explains it! I've been contacting school about my e-mail address being spammed; I was certain I never publicly posted it. I used my school's e-mail address for the Dropbox Space Race a while ago.

There are several reasons you could be getting spam that aren't related to Dropbox. Without knowing your address, it's possible that the spammers randomly guessed it. Another possibility is that a friend's email or Facebook account was compromised, exposing your email address. (I get a disturbing amount of spam this way.) The cases described in the Dropbox forum are more convincing because the addresses were used onl…

It fascinates me how desperate folks are to excuse Dropbox. I wonder why - is it because they're a startup?

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#179

Post by 27182818284 »

acoleman616 wrote: post #118
chmars wrote: post #115

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…

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

Founder of Dropbox is a YC alum, and HN is likely visited by a lot of the employees

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#180

Post by itsybitsycoder »

pfranz wrote: post #88
jaibot wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pointless in practice in theory; in practice in practice spammers (in my experience) don't target + aliases. And if you think about the set of people who are likely to give money to spammers, the set of people using + aliases, and the fraction of + alias space that is occupied versus the fraction of non-+'aliased space that is occupied, the reason why becomes clear.

I've tried to use this system in the past, but found it to be a PITA. A lot of email systems won't let you use a +. The other gotcha I get is that they use the email address as a login token (Dropbox, for example). So you have to remember a) that you used a token and b) what it was. Any suggestions on approaching these?

I once ran into the problem where a retail site forced me to sign up before paying, then refused to accept Paypal payment from any address except the one I signed up with. Of course my Paypal wasn't myemail+retailsite@gmail.com. Very annoying.
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