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Why was my email leaked?

forums.dropbox.com

41–50 of 265 posts

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#41
post #4

The way the moderators handled this was pretty damn bad. Two different users tell the moderator they use UNIQUE e-mail addresses for dropbox only, and they received spam roughly at the same time and yet the moderator answers by assuming the users are idiots.

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.

why wouldn't you want your employees having contact with your customers?

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#42
Why do people continue to upload and trust their data to this company? I closed my Dropbox account back in 2011 when they had that 'bug' that made passwords for any account optional for four hours.

Since then they have had more security problems/breaches, and admitted to user info being stolen.

Today's news isn't anything concrete... but their moderators were jerks, which makes the company look bad whether they are employees or not.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#43
post #13

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

Reading that thread was painful. I always use custom one-off email addresses for services I sign-up for and. When I've attempted to report disclosure of my email address I'm almost always met with major skepticism. It's maddening. I used to enjoy the reactions I'd get from store clerks and telephone reps when I give them my email address. "Oh, how you have an email address with our company name in it?" In recent year…

Acme Inc's employees being suspicious of people with "acme" in their email address is probably, on the whole, a good thing. It smells like a phishing scam to people who don't know about throwaways.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#44
post #20

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'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.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#45
That's why client-side encryption is useful - even with the company (Dropbox) not leaking/selling their users' data on purpose, it is easy to inadvertently leak it.

Proper client-side encryption, while often not appropriate in critical environments, is useful to protect against this type of situations.

Disclosure: I run AES.io

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#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!)

Since then we've used MailChimp, and had no problems.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#47
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.

IOW, they work for Dropbox, they just don't get paid for it.

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#48

I was skeptical at first, but the rest of the evidence makes it look like it's not a coincidence.

This is most definitely not a coincidence. I can tell because this totally explains the spam in the past few days to my school e-mail address. I too use an e-mail address unique for everything, so I thought school leaked it, but this is the only plausible alternative (had to use the school e-mail address on Dropbox for the Space Race a while ago).

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#49
post #20

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…

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

Re: Why was my email leaked?

#50
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 only for Dropbox and don't seem to be guessable.
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