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The simplest answer is they are voluntarily being scum and selling user data to make a quick buck. It’s almost universally true.

by jen20 7mo ago

gruez 7mo ago
>and selling user data to make a quick buck Are there actually companies that will pay you $$$ for a list of emails?
- jen20 7mo ago
  Not exactly, but plenty will just sell everything to data brokers.
  - gruez 7mo ago
    >but plenty will just sell everything to data brokers. Again, "sell" implies that there's some company where they'll accept data from anyone and pay them for it, which so far as I can tell doesn't exist. That's not to say there's no selling going on. The fact that data brokers exist means they do, but that doesn't mean every business is in a position to "sell" data.
- renewiltord 7mo ago
  It's worth nothing. This is an online myth that marks out the user the way the sentence "Expert in JAVA, AWS, GCP, Oracle, and GIT" on a resume marks out the candidate.
  - alt227 7mo ago
    My boss has paid many people for lists of email addresses in the past. Im pretty sure he is not a mythical being!
    - renewiltord 7mo ago
      You can buy it. But companies don’t sell it. Email lists are worth nothing to enterprise.
JimDabell 7mo ago
> It’s almost universally true. It’s not. I give a unique email address to every service I register with, which means I can see who is leaking my email address. Very few of them leak my email address at all, and those that do tend to do so involuntarily through data breaches. The other main factors in spam are the sleazeballs at Apollo, ZoomInfo, et al., services that use my email address internally for more than I consented (if I use my email address to register for a service, this does not permit that service to add me to their product mailing list), and the spammers who guess email addresses based on LinkedIn info (e.g. name + company domain). The number of services who appear to take an email address I have given them and sell it appear to be extremely rare.
- jen20 7mo ago
  I do the same, and seem to have a much higher hit rate (or a much lower acceptable baseline!)
- alt227 7mo ago
  If you dont mind, What kind of unique email address do you use and how do you manage all the aliases?
  - JimDabell 7mo ago
    There’s no real management involved. I set up a wildcard MX record for *.example.com and hand out jim@<some-id>.example.com whenever anything needs my email address. I don’t need to specifically set up an alias. If spam comes in, I look at the To address to determine where they obtained my email address. Fastmail can be configured this way, for instance. Most mail providers also support plus addresses or wildcard local parts, so you can do jim+<some-id>@example.com or just <some-id>@example.com. Gmail supports plus addresses, for instance. The downside is that some services reject pluses and some spammers strip out the IDs.

The simplest answer is they are voluntarily being scum and selling user data to make a quick buck. It’s almost universally true.

by jen20 7mo ago

The simplest answer is they are voluntarily being scum and selling user data to make a quick buck. It’s almost universally true.

gruez 7mo ago

>and selling user data to make a quick buck Are there actually companies that will pay you $$$ for a list of emails?

jen20 7mo ago
Not exactly, but plenty will just sell everything to data brokers.
- gruez 7mo ago
  >but plenty will just sell everything to data brokers. Again, "sell" implies that there's some company where they'll accept data from anyone and pay them for it, which so far as I can tell doesn't exist. That's not to say there's no selling going on. The fact that data brokers exist means they do, but that doesn't mean every business is in a position to "sell" data.
renewiltord 7mo ago
It's worth nothing. This is an online myth that marks out the user the way the sentence "Expert in JAVA, AWS, GCP, Oracle, and GIT" on a resume marks out the candidate.
- alt227 7mo ago
  My boss has paid many people for lists of email addresses in the past. Im pretty sure he is not a mythical being!
  - renewiltord 7mo ago
    You can buy it. But companies don’t sell it. Email lists are worth nothing to enterprise.

JimDabell 7mo ago

> It’s almost universally true. It’s not. I give a unique email address to every service I register with, which means I can see who is leaking my email address. Very few of them leak my email address at all, and those that do tend to do so involuntarily through data breaches. The other main factors in spam are the sleazeballs at Apollo, ZoomInfo, et al., services that use my email address internally for more than I consented (if I use my email address to register for a service, this does not permit that service to add me to their product mailing list), and the spammers who guess email addresses based on LinkedIn info (e.g. name + company domain). The number of services who appear to take an email address I have given them and sell it appear to be extremely rare.

jen20 7mo ago
I do the same, and seem to have a much higher hit rate (or a much lower acceptable baseline!)
alt227 7mo ago
If you dont mind, What kind of unique email address do you use and how do you manage all the aliases?
- JimDabell 7mo ago
  There’s no real management involved. I set up a wildcard MX record for *.example.com and hand out jim@<some-id>.example.com whenever anything needs my email address. I don’t need to specifically set up an alias. If spam comes in, I look at the To address to determine where they obtained my email address. Fastmail can be configured this way, for instance. Most mail providers also support plus addresses or wildcard local parts, so you can do jim+<some-id>@example.com or just <some-id>@example.com. Gmail supports plus addresses, for instance. The downside is that some services reject pluses and some spammers strip out the IDs.