Lemmy is probably hurting email spammers because users and community names look like email addresses. (infosec.pub)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I wonder how many thousands of spam bots have tried to connect to the servers and send email using text ripped from these pages federated across numerous domains.

And they can’t just block one website. They’d have to individually block every node if they want to crawl the web for email addresses to steal. I hope it’s a real thorn in their side.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

At my instance I did setup a email wildcard (receive emails from any address on that domain which don't already have a account) and I get a lot of phishing and scam emails, most of them are send "to" /c/[email protected], as link to this community is linked in sidebar, but I also seen emails "send to" random usernames

screenshot showing email mailbox, about 15 phishing emails

So yeah, It is happening, i wonder how bad it is on larger instances

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I personally love my catch-all email domain. Anything that isn’t addressed to a specific list of addresses lands in a generic secondary inbox. So like I can have a personal inbox with the email address I give to friends, a work inbox for the address I give to clients, and an “everything else” inbox that isn’t associated with either work or personal emails.

It also allows me to easily identify which companies are selling my info. If I sign up to a Walmart membership with “Walmart@[domain]” and then start seeing a bunch of spam at that address, I know they sold my info to some ad company. I can simply burn that address; I just filter everything from that address straight into spam. And now my inbox is clean again.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Crap, that sounds amazing! Any good resources you'd suggest for getting started with doing that?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Btw, the last one can be done via plus-addresses on at least GMail and Outlook; [email protected] will forward to [email protected], and you'll see that it was sent through [email protected] at the top.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Wow! Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

[-] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The horror! I hope you have a good spam filter

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

thankfully that is a special mailbox for spam, I sometimes like to come through the emails and see where they submit the data, and maybe submit some data on my own, plus report the issue to website owner/hosting

this post was submitted on 11 May 2024

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