this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
105 points (97.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35700 readers
2553 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm very careful with privacy and security so I was surprised I got an obvious phishing email from "American Express". I reported the email and moved on only to get another one today. I checked haveibeenpwned and it came back clear. I have never gotten a phishing email before the other day. As for the senders, they all came from generic IT sounding email addresses. They obviously weren't American Express.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If you have signed up on dubious websites with questionable privacy policy, many of them legally sell this data to "data brokers" who then sell it to anyone willing to pay. This happens more than you'd think, for example in 2019 it was reported California DMV makes $50 million a year selling users information. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a32035408/dmv-selling-driver-data/

One neat trick is to signup for services with an email like [email protected], that way if you ever get spam you'll know where you have been compromised.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Information might also be leaked through data breaches. An email is not a particularly hard thing to find, or even guess.

A spammer could easily just have a computer iterate through all possible combinations of emails and usernames, and shotgun it.

Especially for a name like OP's. If their email is a similar name, it wouldn't be difficult for generate one that is also two words.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Nah, my email is my name. It's a very uncommon name.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

A program to send to [list of firstname.lastname pulled from the census]@gmail.com or whatever is pretty easy. Also merchants sell the email lists for $ so if you've bought anything with that email that could be it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And you have zero social media with your name?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Correct. I ditched social media a few years ago. No regrets. I deleted every account I did have. Snapchat was the last hold out. I deleted it because I got a popup that required I give consent to be used for AI training or some shit so I deleted the account.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I’ve used this many times before. But this is so well known I wonder, why wouldn’t spammers/scammers just remove the “+” and trailing characters before “@“?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

True. A more reliable way to achieve this is to buy a domain and use addresses in the form [email protected].

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Yeah that also usually comes up in these types of discussions. Even for technical people, that approach can be a pain to manage.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I might need to use your trick in the future. Thank you!