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> @AskPayPal: I recommend deleting that tweet, it has your personal info > @troyhunt: It has my email address – I get email by sharing it with people who might
by xentronium 11y ago
> @AskPayPal: I recommend deleting that tweet, it has your personal info
> @troyhunt: It has my email address – I get email by sharing it with people who might want to send me email!
This is golden. Hilariously incompetent tech support trying to make someone delete the tweet complaining about their spam.
- mikeash 11y agoIt's probably earnest. An amazingly large number of people think that making your personal e-mail address public is somehow unwise.
- brianwawok 11y agoI mean, it does slightly increase your rate of spam. I have a private email that I only give out to RL people that has never received a spam message.
- siphor 11y agoWow I love this idea! Can't believe I haven't thought of it
- sean-duffy 11y agoHaving a 'spam email' that you use to sign up for stuff and a separate one for non-automated communication only is definitely a good idea.
- sliverstorm 11y agoIf you can keep your email address off the front page of the internet, I figure that will help reduce spam.
- mikeash 11y agoAt this point, that's like trying to reduce flooding by not dumping a bucket into the river. There's so much spam out there that your only hope is effective filtering.
- sliverstorm 11y agoOh, I've still got filtering, but it reduces how good/aggressive my filtering has to be. It is indeed very difficult to keep ALL your email addresses from being publicly listed, so I use GMail accounts for the ones plastered all over the web, and let GMail handle the spam.
- mfoy_ 11y agoHanlon's Razor dictates to "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
- bcrescimanno 11y agoFrom the perspective of PayPal, it's not that his personal email address is made public. It's that the fact that he has a PayPal account associated with that email address is made public. It's similar to advice for "forgot password" forms not to acknowledge whether or not an email address or username actually exists--simply tell the user an email was sent for that account regardless.
- tempestn 11y agoFair enough, but it's a reasonable guess that any given primary email address has a paypal account associated with it. It's also not really secret, because you share that information with people to allow them to send you money.