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Comment on Ask HN: A business sold my email. What can I do about it?parent

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I don't think so. Here is my experience so far. For background, I don't run a spam filter at all and host my own mail on a enterprise fiber line that's unlikely to have ISP-level filtering. (If they do have it, it's terrible, since it doesn't even block email that has a certain product targeted at males mentioned in the subject line and spelled correctly.)

I've only seen what would be considered dictionary attempts for four addresses, info@, admin@, sales@, and support@ but only on a few of the domains.

A few years ago I started getting spam at random hexadecimal addresses at two of my domains, such as 72da48ba6@, about two spams per address per day. There turned out to only be ~ 800 unique addresses that were targeted, and so it was easy to block. What I think happened is this case is a address-to-spam-list creator padded his lists manually before selling them to make the list size bigger. I still get email at those 800 addresses, but no new hexadecimal addresses since I blocked the original set.

I have a different explanation for the hexadecimal addresses.

I get maybe 30 a day, from numerous sources, and they actually turn out to be legitimate message-IDs which were generated by my host when replying to public mailing-lists.

I think some kind of automated spider decided they were mail addresses.

Oh, I hadn't thought of that. That makes perfect sense.

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