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In Germany there are lots of freemail providers. Some of them sell all the contact data to spammers: - web.de - gmx.de/net/com I reproduced this with a new d
by cookiengineer 5y ago
In Germany there are lots of freemail providers. Some of them sell all the contact data to spammers:
- web.de
- gmx.de/net/com
I reproduced this with a new domain, a nowhere occuring email on an email server that does not list its accounts via imap, and a single email from those services to the new email was enough to receive spam afterwards; even when the email wasn't listed anywhere on the web.
On a couple other addresses they receive spam mostly from Ghana, Botswana, or rural Delhi, so they're easy to identify. I keep the reddit-trained reply NLP bot active to reply to spammers and keep em busy.
At some point I might go the offensive route, cause they always seem to use standard software on outdated Windows machines, with couple of aliases of Western sounding names (well, at least in their own imagination).
My opsec mandates that I split up email addresses by security level and purpose, and the emails aren't related anyhow, don't use the same name and are basically random emails that cannot be correlated. I'd also encourage everyone to use a password manager and use only random passwords everywhere to prevent account stuffing or stupid script kiddies trying to compromise your accounts.
If there's one thing the BreachCompilation has taught me it's that every humanly chosen password is based on patterns and/or easily gathered social structures that surround them on a daily basis.
- Tevias 5y agoI personally cannot confirm this for web.de For years I had been using their email service without receiving a single spam mail. Now, I do get occasionally spam but only few a month but only for the account I use a lot. For the newly created ones again no spam.
- meinersbur 5y agoI do have a commonname@web.de and a *@mydomain catchall email addressed. Years ago I had my own email server on mydomain, but I got up to 30k spam per month which pushed me into abandoning my own email server and instead let Google be my MX, and forwarding the web.de mails to it. Google is very successful in rejecting spam before acknowledging its reception via SMTP (probably mostly via IP blacklist) so I don't see it, the amount of spam shrank drastically. For a very long time a lot of spam came via icq@mydomain (yes, it has been a while), but nowadays almost all spam that I see comes via the @web.de address where Google cannot apply its IP blacklist because its received via web.de's servers. I know because the mydomain email server also used to forward received mails to Google, resulting in said 30k entries in the spam folder. The transition to put Google itself in the DNS record made all the difference. I am kind-of surprised I don't see more spam coming via the catchall address. Sometimes spammers use mydomain with random local part as sender address, so I get bounces.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 5y agoI've had a GMX address as backup for over a decade. No spam issues whatsoever.
- brimwats 5y agowhat's the reddit bot you mention?