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PaulDavisThe1styesterday at 7:09 PM1 replyview on HN

I receive at least a dozen spam emails every day, sometimes as many as 60.

Rarely does more than one per day show up in my main inbox.

Why should I care who has my email address?


Replies

B1FIDOyesterday at 7:28 PM

Well, spam is no big deal, and any scam that comes via email should not affect anyone who is educated and prepared for them.

Of course, with a well-known email address, you could run a higher risk of credential stuffing, and an account takeover by someone who hijacks your email account, and then pivots from there to taking other accounts.

But this seems to be a risk we all take: email addresses are meant to be shared, to be public, and to be well-known to anyone to correspond with us.

I will say that disclosing my email address to certain parties has had noticeable effects. For example, I used "[email protected]" once, and only once. My godfather had passed away, and I ordered some flowers for his funeral. And I put that order through with that email address.

Well, Echovita themselves had a data breach shortly afterwards, and I was inundated with scam emails. Just all sorts of attackers and they were basically all using the same M.O. But they were readily identifiable because I had used that "+Echovita" to identify it uniquely. And they really haven't stopped coming in. It's been 5 years since that breach.

So yes, especially with untrusted parties, it may help to tag your email address. I don't worry about receiving spam anywhere. But like I said, since I've never ever disclosed the addresses of 2-3 of my "alt accounts" they simply never receive any mail at all, spam or no spam.

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