News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach. Parent comment

Re:Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromis... by cleaver on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @06:14PM (#6851205)
The key motivation is not security, but if any account starts receiving spam, I will have a good idea where it is coming from. It also lets me shut off mail from any source.

Some services will use that as the username, others allow me to pick my own. Using a password manager helps this whole scheme. Now that I do that, I could go to random email addresses and usernames.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromis... by walden42 on Wednesday December 04, 2013 @06:53PM (#6851502)
The only problem I've found with this method is the spammers that try to guess your email, so they end up sending emails to "[email protected]", "[email protected]", etc. The catch-all forwards them all to me.

The only way around this, I think, is to only have uncommon emails, like instead of [email protected], use [email protected]. Put a block on the common ones and you're good to go.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromis... by darkarmani on Thursday December 05, 2013 @01:55PM (#6856327)
It's not that spammers try to guess your email, but that if you accept any email address as valid they'll notice that you are accepting delivery.

Once i figured this out i just created wildcard aliases that end with a static prefix: [email protected], [email protected], etc. This cuts down on 99% of the random spam.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromis... by octo_t on Thursday December 05, 2013 @08:44AM (#6854312)
regrettably this is against RFC 2142[1], which states that you need to leave certain mailboxes open (such as abuse@domain, webmaster@domain etc)

[1] - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Have I been pwned? Check if your email has been compromis... by cleaver on Thursday December 05, 2013 @03:00PM (#6856771)
Quite ironic, isn't it, how "[email protected]" is a conduit for abuse?

Spammers effectively killed that RFC.

[ Parent | on HN ]