7 ms·

Wow, that should not have happened. Can you let me know the name of the recruiter? You can email me at keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail Sorry you had a bad experi

Wow, that should not have happened. Can you let me know the name of the recruiter? You can email me at keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail Sorry you had a bad experience and I'm bummed we lost you :(

knodi123 8y ago
> keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...
- ikeboy 8y ago
  I put a unique email address in my hn profile at one point and got spam sent to it after a few months
- ramphastidae 8y ago
  I imagine it's still a thing, but spam filters have solved most of the problem.
- btown 8y ago
  Large-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.
  - fgrante 8y ago
    François from Hunter here. Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt. However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection. We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim https://hunter.io/claim.
- dewey 8y ago
  I doubt there’s an email scraper that hasn’t added logic to replace [at] with @ etc. - so most of these obfuscations are absolutely useless too.
- bauerd 8y ago
  I had my unobfuscated email in my HN profile for no more than 2 weeks, and received a couple of cold mails in turn (to this date, actually).
- kposehn 8y ago
  Sadly yes - for major company emails at least.
kwelstr 8y ago
Just an aside, you can ignore the dot on your email, or add as many as you like. Google ignores periods on email addresses. Just google it... :D
- dgzl 8y ago
  Another fun feature with Gmail is that you can add arbitrary text to the end of your email addresses. This can be helpful if you're interested in tracking the origins of where your received emails come from. For instance, if you sign up your address at a website and start recieving sketchy emails with a destination for myemail+thatwebsite[at]gmail, you can easily find out where the leakage occurred.
  - setr 8y ago
    Aren’t both of those things relatively standard for email in general
    - callahad 8y ago
      Plus-based subaddresses are relatively common (sendmail supports them, Sieve has RFC 5233, etc), but dot-insensitivity is/was unique to gmail as far as I'm aware.
  - aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
    Unless the spammer knows about this too and trims any +suffixes from the addresses.
    - brianpgordon 8y ago
      FastMail thought of this and lets you use subdomains instead. So user@tag.domain gets delivered to your mailbox as user+tag@domain.
  - xte 8y ago
    Hem it's not a GMail specific feature but a common one (sub-addressing/plus addressing, RFC 5233) that skip inbox and drop messages in the +$name/tag dir/label... The GMail specific feature is adding dots as you want in your mail localpart so (foobar, f.oo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r etc @gmail are the very same mailbox).
jefftk 8y ago
It kind of sounds like you're from Uber, but you're not giving an @uber.com address?
- michaelmcdonald 8y ago
  A quick google of the name and you can see he is; however I agree: anyone could have that email address. If he's legit from Uber and wants correspondence about an Uber interaction he should be listing his @uber.com address.
- kposehn 8y ago
  I tend to not give out my Uber email as I get a ton of solicitations every day. Forum/web email scraping is still very much a real thing unfortunately.

Wow, that should not have happened. Can you let me know the name of the recruiter? You can email me at keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail Sorry you had a bad experience and I'm bummed we lost you :(

knodi123 8y ago

> keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...

ikeboy 8y ago
I put a unique email address in my hn profile at one point and got spam sent to it after a few months
ramphastidae 8y ago
I imagine it's still a thing, but spam filters have solved most of the problem.
btown 8y ago
Large-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.
- fgrante 8y ago
  François from Hunter here. Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt. However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection. We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim https://hunter.io/claim.
dewey 8y ago
I doubt there’s an email scraper that hasn’t added logic to replace [at] with @ etc. - so most of these obfuscations are absolutely useless too.
bauerd 8y ago
I had my unobfuscated email in my HN profile for no more than 2 weeks, and received a couple of cold mails in turn (to this date, actually).
kposehn 8y ago
Sadly yes - for major company emails at least.

kwelstr 8y ago

Just an aside, you can ignore the dot on your email, or add as many as you like. Google ignores periods on email addresses. Just google it... :D

dgzl 8y ago
Another fun feature with Gmail is that you can add arbitrary text to the end of your email addresses. This can be helpful if you're interested in tracking the origins of where your received emails come from. For instance, if you sign up your address at a website and start recieving sketchy emails with a destination for myemail+thatwebsite[at]gmail, you can easily find out where the leakage occurred.
- setr 8y ago
  Aren’t both of those things relatively standard for email in general
  - callahad 8y ago
    Plus-based subaddresses are relatively common (sendmail supports them, Sieve has RFC 5233, etc), but dot-insensitivity is/was unique to gmail as far as I'm aware.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  Unless the spammer knows about this too and trims any +suffixes from the addresses.
  - brianpgordon 8y ago
    FastMail thought of this and lets you use subdomains instead. So user@tag.domain gets delivered to your mailbox as user+tag@domain.
- xte 8y ago
  Hem it's not a GMail specific feature but a common one (sub-addressing/plus addressing, RFC 5233) that skip inbox and drop messages in the +$name/tag dir/label... The GMail specific feature is adding dots as you want in your mail localpart so (foobar, f.oo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r etc @gmail are the very same mailbox).

jefftk 8y ago

It kind of sounds like you're from Uber, but you're not giving an @uber.com address?

michaelmcdonald 8y ago
A quick google of the name and you can see he is; however I agree: anyone could have that email address. If he's legit from Uber and wants correspondence about an Uber interaction he should be listing his @uber.com address.
kposehn 8y ago
I tend to not give out my Uber email as I get a ton of solicitations every day. Forum/web email scraping is still very much a real thing unfortunately.