Usually this is from LinkedIn, GitHub, etc scraping... There are databases where they just guess and verify emails too
The medical world uses the terms indications and contraindications. I think we in IT could do with a similar process/procedure.
It can take a while for spammers to get your address on their list. Generally the amount of spam over time only goes up. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean there is a causation. Anyone with an email address, including on a custom work domain, has experienced this and Claude wasn't responsible for all email spam lol
> I am sick and tired of the relentless grifting that's overtaking the software industry.
It's only going to get worse especially depending on your definition of grifting in this context. I've been doing this for a long time but these days I don't even write code. I have AI write the code, monitoring the logs, and suggesting PRs. Our users are happy, I'm happy, and we get features out very quickly without any sort of uptick in bugs. Some people consider that grifting but others will just see it as the current state of development. By the way that's the way that things will become more and more over time. It's scary how good AI is at things these days. I was testing it on 3D modeling with Blender yesterday and was blown away.
If that wasn't bad enough, they're stealing and depriving everyone of critical resources like RAM, electricity, natural resources [1], public land, and taxpayer money.
All this for what exactly? Most of this isn't based at all on current demand, but rather the idea that they can make much better use of resources in the future than serving the people that actually need them.
This is the grifting. They're selling hypothetical demand while robbing everyone else of the actual resources that we all rely on. These companies are acting like the scammers at Wall Street who caused the 2008 financial crisis, except that the scale and scope of the harm is so much worse.
Your argument is akin to the Wall Street scammers cheering for themselves in the lead-up to the financial crisis. "See? We're making it possible for people to afford homes, but you ungrateful people are calling affordable housing grifting."
That's gross.
Even the Wall Street scammers didn't publicly display this level of arrogance. Because at least, the superficial benefit was affordable housing, not the joy of rich assholes being able to play with their shiny new toy.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/...
Sorry, I don't understand what is the "hypothetical demand" you identified in my comment you replied to? There is real demand for AI. I use it daily for years and my usage has only been increasing as its become more competent and I've learned how to use it better. If you think that is BS and its all hypothetical, you quite simply just don't know what you are talking about.
> Your argument is akin to the Wall Street scammers cheering for themselves in the lead-up to the financial crisis. "See? We're making it possible for people to afford homes, but you ungrateful people are calling affordable housing grifting."
What argument are you referring to? Can you specifically quote what you are talking about that I said because I don't understand. Just seems like you wanted to find a way to bring this back to a previous bubble and call me a scammer simply for not being anti-AI.
But I agree with you on one point. Voters demanded change, and it's not in favor of the enablers who think any of the above is okay. And childish behavior like trying to call people mentally ill without getting flagged will not buy you any sympathy.
Also I didn't bring up mental illness first, hope you're doing fine.
Why is every accusation a confession with you people? I clarified multiple times what the issue is, and every single time you've either ignored, denied, or downplayed. You pretend that the people being robbed of resources are just "resisting change," and are now even calling us "literal bots." If that's how you view people, no wonder you think it's "bad faith" to oppose the massive exploitation that's going on.
> Also I didn't bring up mental illness first
I didn't call you mentally ill, only you did that.
> hope you're doing fine.
And you did it again. That's your idea of good faith, really? It just looks petty and childish, you know?
I asked you very specific questions because I genuinely was trying to understand what points you were making and what argument you thought I was trying to make and you never addressed those very specific questions. If I ask you specific questions and then you completely ignore them that isn't really going to lead to a productive conversation. You are just letting emotion control you and you are justifying it by assuming that you are more empathetic than me which frankly isn't even relevant.
Another issue that makes having a discussion with you impossible is that you keep using the plural form of words like "you people" and "are now even calling us...". I am a singular person talking to you another singular person. Stop trying to put myself and yourself into buckets and extrapolate this conversation into things I never said just because people that you might think are similar to me have said in the past. I was calling you a literal bot for bringing up politics out of nowhere. I'm not talking about "you people" or anyone else, or any other situation, I'm only talking about you in that specific context. Stop extrapolating everything and putting words in my mouth. It's exhausting and even trying to have a conversation with you is simply not happening so I'm not going to reply further.
> Sorry, I don't understand what is the "hypothetical demand" you identified in my comment you replied to? ... If you think that is BS and its all hypothetical, you quite simply just don't know what you are talking about.
"You quite simply just don't know what you are talking about" is not a question. It's denial of a very real issue. It's no secret that Anthropic and co. are currently depriving others of resources based on speculative future demand, threatening human extinction if they don't have their way. How much imaginary future demand justifies such deprivation? At that point, who is all of this even for?
Or by "question," are you referring to this:
> Just seems like you wanted to find a way to bring this back to a previous bubble and call me a scammer simply for not being anti-AI.
The exact same straw man rephrased, also not a question.
> You are just letting emotion control you
Says the person repeatedly calling people mental.
> I was calling you a literal bot for bringing up politics out of nowhere
The insane amount of resources being allocated to LLM datacenters was one of the deciding factors in the outcome of the election. People wanted change, the precise thing you accused me of being against. You invited that discussion.
Furthermore, you call me a "bot" for bringing up this point, saying it's "irrelevant." Calling that dismissal of human suffering for what it is isn't "extrapolation."
By questions I was referring to my sentences that ended up with a question mark that you ignored several comments back. None of them were rhetorical.
AI companies can barely meet current demand. I don't know why you think all the demand is hypothetical but that's on you.
Good luck, you'll need it.
Also, you think you need Claude to do ctrl-f? No wonder you have such a visceral reaction to the idea of placing limits on LLM resource usage.
You appear to suffer from a cognitive dissonance so severe that you’re no longer able to understand the concept of time or numbers. Or even the difference between all and some.
Much of the resources being seized by these companies aren’t being used to serve live requests yet. Your claim that it’s serving current demand is a logical impossibility. It’s future demand.
And you refuse to even contemplate this at all, but what on earth justifies depriving people of resources they need to live? People being denied access to everything from RAM, electricity, natural resources, land, and money has consequences. But the only thing you’ve shown care for is the interest of LLM providers. You lash out against any criticism of their actions by calling people mental over and over.
You need a good hard look at yourself in the mirror, because that behavior is beyond unacceptable.
Exactly. You made my point. Thank you!
> And you refuse to even contemplate this at all, but what on earth justifies depriving people of resources they need to live?
Hyperbole strawman alarmist BS.
> Consider this before you post the same insult again.
I didn't insult your poor mental health. I just pointed out you should seek help.
You win! By ignoring, denying, and downplaying everything that contradicts you. This is just pathetic.
> Hyperbole strawman alarmist BS.
Then why were you so reluctant to say that much earlier on? Because even under heavy cognitive dissonance, you instinctively understood that this topic is too well documented that it makes you look out of touch. Like, tell me where I can get affordable RAM right now?
> I didn't insult your poor mental health. I just pointed out you should seek help.
It's a sign of immaturity to call people mental over and over. And saying "I didn't use those exact words" makes it all the more so. Everybody that I grew up with stopped doing that by the time they got to high school. At least stop doing that to yourself, for your own sake.
It's supply and demand. Would you prefer communism or some sort of market intervention? (That is not a rhetorical question by the way, I know that confuses you.) I'm not sure what you are even suggesting. Yeah I don't like that RAM is more expensive either but... You just have to deal with it for now. I'm sorry your MacBook was $200 more than usual.
> It's a sign of immaturity to call people mental over and over.
First of all I never called you mental and second of all you are the one who brought up depression first. It seemed like you were struggling.
I am a heavy user and I checked my logs and never once did it include my email in any sort of web requests. The chance that it actually included that person's email and then that led to them getting spammed is just incredibly low.
For example, my only used by Claude email address doesn't get any spam at all.
98% I look at a LinkedIn profile, my $SALES_LEAD Chrome extension shows me their email + phone.
(To be clear, not from LinkedIn, but given their name/city/company.)
Claude Code is not sending your email address to websites as a default, or regularly. It is not some automatic header or anything.
Rather, if you are performing certain kinds of research on sites that involves downloading certain kinds of information, like on Wikipedia or the SEC, it supplies your e-mail address when the sites request it as part of their download policy. As part of anti-bot policy.
Wikipedia and the SEC are not selling your e-mail address to spammers. And these are the two main sites where it has come up.
This is an awfully leaky issue.
It is not.
And to be honest, I don't even know which are they!
If I can find out I might be able to share them.
I burnt a few tokens to get some clarity on this:
> This doesn't appear to be Claude Code automatically attaching your email address to every outgoing request. The issue is that Claude has access to your account email in its context and can sometimes include it when generating HTTP requests (e.g. "curl" commands).
> Wikipedia and the SEC were mentioned because they explicitly ask automated clients to identify themselves through the "User-Agent" header, often with contact information. Claude may try to comply with those requirements by inserting your personal email address.
> That's why the leak is probably concentrated on sites with these policies, rather than happening on every website. But Wikipedia and the SEC aren't an exhaustive list (the EVE Online API was also mentioned), and there's no technical guarantee that Claude couldn't include the email in requests to other domains.
> The important distinction is that this appears to be model-generated behavior, not a networking layer automatically adding your email to all requests.
> So "most likely Wikipedia and SEC" is a reasonable hypothesis about where the leak is more likely to occur, not a confirmed limit on where your email could have been exposed.
I do see a lot of times curl being used. I don't check all the websites being fetched (shame on me!), but your answer doesn't convince me.
My coincidence is clearly not proof. I am just a random online guy so why trust me. I just shared my recent experience. I used extensively copilot until roughly 3 weeks ago (I went all in on Claude, to try it out properly), and that's when I started to see a lot of spam on my work account. Coincidence? Yes. Correlation? Yes. Causation? No. And I personally don't care because I assume my work email account is somewhere to be harvested, but when I then see such a but report, it kind of rang a bell like WTF. I am as careful as possible about the requests I send, but I cannot remove the UA or know everything the harness is doing behind the scenes.
This type of bugs kind of kills the trust in the tooling. On the other hand, we're being told to use more and more such black boxes.
Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).