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Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
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Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#52My wife and I have used a unique address for every company/service for 15 years or so (both online and physical stores).
We’ve gotten less spam than I expected and from fewer sources.
The big ones are dropbox (likely breach related), justworks, [email addresses listed in Whois records - note: Whois privacy features are absolutely worth it], and emails associated with open source projects and businesses that get listed in repos/project/business websites.
I have blacklisted 1 video game discussion forum whose owners sold it and all its data and 4-5 misc retailers (mostly in fashion/clothing) for either outright spam or having non-functional un-subscription features.
We continue to use this email strategy for a variety of reasons, not only spam management. I don’t think I would set such a system up if my only goal was spam reduction as breaches and publicly posted addresses account for the vast majority of the spam and those will get you either way. There is merit to having your main personal address be separate from the ones you publically post for business/open source purposes.
As an aside: the experience has led me to an anti-spam idea that I wonder if anyone has tried on a larger scale. I have multiple different addresses that were clearly involved in a breach or I post on public websites where they get scraped. However, I know that both addresses are unrelated to each other so I end up getting listed on some spam lists multiple times. In these cases, any message where you get separate copies to multiple different addresses is spam 100% of the time.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#53Mostly email addresses from forums that got hacked. Or addresses used while my domain was owned by someone else (I didn't renew it, but then they didn't renew it and I got it back)
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#54Netflix, Uber, Airtel, Reliance Jio, Paytm, Swiggy, almost every bank and neo bank (India) I’ve tried, hospitals and diagnostic centres (I’ll be shocked and devastated if they’re not selling my health data to everybody who’s willing to pay a paisa or more), insurance provider, Coinbase, PayPal, TrueCaller, Facebook, Dell, Amazon, LinkedIn, Amex etc are few I remember. And the great people who think it’s okay to use t…
>So maybe use a unique email for every friend and personal contact? :D
This isn't really so bad an idea. When it comes to your contact info, your friends/family are probably the big adversarial vector to your info. Their ignorance is your worst security.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#55I mostly use one single address, but I can tell you exactly where all the spam comes from: idiots whose name is the same as mine. They give my address as if it belonged to them. Probably they created addresses like narag33@server and they believe that it's narag@server instead. So not only I receive all the spam from dubious sites that they suscribed to, but also their legitimate mail from lists and friends. My names…
I deal with the same problem with fullname@gmail. My name is very common, surprisingly so if you're not Italian. I get emails for:
* A Joe who runs a lego engineering team at his high school
* A Joe who goes to bible study in Utah
* A Joe who is building a house in Victoria Australia (I'm so familiar with him/others screwing up his email that I can forward it to him and his wife easily.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#56My wife and I have used a unique address for every company/service for 15 years or so (both online and physical stores). We’ve gotten less spam than I expected and from fewer sources. The big ones are dropbox (likely breach related), justworks, [email addresses listed in Whois records - note: Whois privacy features are absolutely worth it], and emails associated with open source projects and businesses that get liste…
> However, I know that both addresses are unrelated to each other so I end up getting listed on some spam lists multiple times. In these cases, any message where you get separate copies to multiple different addresses is spam 100% of the time.
I think you just described a bloom filter.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#57I’ve done this for about 30 years. USPS is by far the worst offender.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#58If the spammers knew about FOIA requests they could harvest a gold mine. Our attorney general was conducting a training session about FOIA compliance--I worked at a community college. I raised my hand and asked if I had to respond to requests for the email addresses for all of our students. The answer was the same, comply as quickly as possible.
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#59It happens about once a year for the 15 years I've had my emails set up that way, and as far as I can tell, 90% of it has been hacked systems rather than sales. The worst was when spammers got ahold of my email from a hotel chain and would add random letters to the username. So, for instance, the email address I provided to the hotel chain was something like hotelchain-jawns@example.com, and the spammers would send t…
That's interesting, I wonder why they decided adding random letters? It reminds me that I used to get a bunch of spam to completely bogus addresses for example:
E1iusbp-00017V-NM@steve.org.uk
Re: Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?
#60Robinhood, Comcast, TicketMaster, Linkedin