this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
29 points (96.8% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36152 readers
922 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm in the process of deGoogling and also shoring up my email privacy, which means I'm hyper aware of mistakes I make, hence the stupid question:

I was testing something with Proton Mail and misspelled the domain—swapped the "r" with one of the neighboring letters.

I didn't get an email bounceback, which is fine, because you don't always get a bounceback anyway. But, should I be concerned that I might have just volunteered my email directly to some spam outfit?

The "wrong" domain is registered. I'm acutely aware that the misspelling being one letter away from "Proton" might be intentional to capture misspellings like the one I made. Also, the wrong domain seems to be associated with oopatet.com and trellian.com, which are blocked by ublock.

Is there anything I should do from a privacy perspective?
Or is this a non-issue?

all 17 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Honestly, mostly a non issue, if the email didn't contain any sensitive info.

Your email address isn't secret, and will be scraped up by spammers sooner or later anyway. Security by obscurity is basically no security at all.

[–] parrottail 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've got a slightly different tale regarding privacy & emails misspellings. I have an email account that is [email protected] and while my name isn't particularly common there are at least 7-8 different people across the world with my name who have on more than one occasion had emails sent to me by mistake (by the namesakes as well as by others). I've never used what was sent to me maliciously, but I have on occasion tried to track down my namesakes to let them know of the error. I've been successful a couple of times, and know a few things that might be a little sensitive. I've managed to find the 'correct' email addresses of a couple of my namesakes & will forward things on when I'm certain who it's supposed to go to. My email address has been the recovery email for power bills, employers, dating sites, and a few other sites. Now imagine what could happen if I weren't the stand-up citizen that I am.

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

Dang. I hold my own [email protected] and haven't gotten squat. Guess mine is even less common.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I guess that depends on what you were testing. If you were changing your email ID on one of your social media or other accounts, then it may become a bit of an issue, as compared to just sending yourself an email from your gmail account

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you were changing your email ID on one of your social media or other accounts

Nothing like that. I wanted to see if Proton let you use the "+" trick (e.g., email+string@proton) and couldn't figure out the keywords to search, so I just did a practical test instead. Sent out a blank email.

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

This is an active concern area. Recent news from the US military has had issues since their domains are .mil and some of Mali's domains are .ml. They have some custom code that has some check "are you sure". Some email companies like Protonmail also have optional timeout before actually sending the email

Same goes for accidentally typing a url instead of the desired, although that might be more dangerous, depending on the host OS and privileges and if the typoed url contains malware

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm curious to know whether the "wrong" domain has a DNS MX record, and where that goes. I expect it does, because if it didn't, you should have gotten an NDR.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lack of an MX record would normally cause the sending mail server to generate an NDR with something along the lines of "bad domain." If the sending server attempted to make an SMTP connected to the A record IP, and then there was no response there, I would expect that sending server to generate a similar NDR.

There are legitimate reasons not to send an NDR for undelivered mail. Invalid address (at a valid domain) would be one; this avoids backscatter and footprinting of valid addresses at a domain with brute force random recipients.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm curious to know whether the "wrong" domain has a DNS MX record

There appears to be one:
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx%3aptoton.me&run=toolpage

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So one of several things happened when you sent that mail:

  • There was a receiving mail server behind that MX IP which accepted and delivered the mail, either to a named mailbox, or with a "catchall" mailbox, where "unmatched" mail goes.
  • There was a receiving mail server which did not deliver the mail, because the address was invalid, but did not generate an NDR.
  • There was not a receiving mail server behind the MX IP, in which case your sending mail server will retry delivery for some period of time, usually measured in days, and when it ultimately fails, then you'll get an NDR.