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Why was my email leaked?

forums.dropbox.com

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Re: Why was my email leaked?

#231

Post by willvarfar »

minm wrote: post #49
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…

Check out Tonido Cloud ( http://www.tonido.com/cloud/ ) and host your own dropbox.

(If you'd prefixed with with "I'm a techie at Tonido which does ..." then you'd have got upvotes instead, especially if you are a techie.)

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#232

Post by EwanToo »

agwa wrote: post #170
eli wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all fun and games until you get attacked by a spambot that tries blindly sending thousands of messages to @yourdomain.com

I use a sub-domain (e.g. @m.mydomain.com) for my catch-all and this hasn't happened to me. There are various easy ways for spammers to find out about domains, but sub-domains can remain relatively obscure.

Oh that's a nice trick, I might give that a go - thanks!

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#233

Post by snikch »

badgar wrote: post #139
benologist wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a very naive response. You cannot expect a community of DropBox's size to be actively monitored by paid employee's in a manner like a public forum.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#234

Post by efdee »

res0nat0r wrote: post #35
xer0x wrote: post #13

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

Those mods don't work for Dropbox, they are community volunteers who've just been given mod permissions.

For all intents and purposes, they represent Dropbox. It is poor choice of Dropbox to let themselves be represented by unqualified, unvetted people and then distance themselves from it "because they are not getting paid". They work for Dropbox, they just do it for free.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#235

Post by efdee »

jzse wrote: post #207
unreal37 wrote: post #188

This dropbox forum is exploding. Fascinating to watch. As an aside, who knew so many people had "dropbox only" email accounts. One guy with 10 random letters/numbers he uses only for dropbox. Wow. Is this a thing?

Email standard lets you use a random string in the adress if you type + after your "name".. For examble you have adress hehe.haha@gmail.com, and now you can give dropbox hehe.haha+dropbox@gmail.com and still get the mails that dropbox sends to the same hehe.haha@gmail.com box while "send to" still remains hehe.haha+dropbox@gmail.com. This is the best way (that I know) to find out where your adress was leaked.

Since it's a standard, it's worthless. Any spammer worth his salt would remove everything after the '+' sign from the email address.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#236

Post by alistair77 »

niggler wrote: post #206
ricardobeat wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your intention, but the issue is not this post alone. Take a look at minm's comment history and you'll see 90% of his posts are promoting Tonido: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=minm I didn't downvote his post at first because it sounded like a genuine suggestion. I consider myself deceived.

I still think you missed my point. The only way in which you could have been deceived is if you went into the discussion assuming no conflict of interest. Years of dealing with financial media and experts has rendered me incredibly cynical, so I focused on the author's claims (which, in this case, are true -- If the product acts as the website claims, the self-hosted solutions store credentials on your servers and no…

You've made the mistake of finding a rule that works in a particular environment and trying to apply it in all situations. The HN community is nothing like the financial industry. Applying that level of cynicism to all aspects of life is likely to have a damaging effect to both you and the communities we live in.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#237

Post by alistair77 »

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.

You just need to add an additional line such as, "I've used product x and it's a brilliant alternative" or "I develop product x and would love your feedback" or "I'm the CTO of..."

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#238

Post by 0x0 »

eli wrote: post #101
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.

It's all fun and games until you get attacked by a spambot that tries blindly sending thousands of messages to @yourdomain.com

Or worse, using @somesubdomain.example.com as the SENDER address on spam to others. I once had spammers find a subdomain that accepted wildcard emails, and the backscatter was just insane. Had to spend a whole day trying to make a list of valid @ on that subdomain to whitelist to put an end to it. (Not easy if you haven't already been keeping track of which addresses you've handed out throughout the years)

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#239

Post by jasonlotito »

badgar wrote: post #139
benologist wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If you're responsible for keeping users happy, the support site.

Or better yet, doing actual support for paying customers?

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#240

Post by jasonlotito »

lucb1e wrote: post #52
johngalt wrote: post #28

Is that dropbox@domain.com email listed on any of your phone contacts? Ever had a virus on a machine that has sent or received an email from that account? How many people know that account exists? Only one of them needs to have a careless attitude about permissions.

Nope, nope and nope.

See, the problem with that email address (dropbox@example.com) is that it tells me that I can try amazon@example.com, paypal@example.com. So, if I get access to an email for somerandomsite@example.com, trying these others is fairly trivial. It takes no time to suddenly generate an effective list of emails to try.

The point being, using a pattern is easy to discover. Even if that pattern is a random set of characters.

Would spammers email this? Yes. Why? Because they bought an email list that someone generated using this method.

Not saying this is what happened here, but if you've entered in emails on a site, you open yourself up.

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