1y ago

Lemmy is probably hurting email spammers because users and community names look like email addresses.

I wonder how many thousands of spam bots have tried to connect to the servers and send email using text ripped from these pages federated across numerous domains.

And they can’t just block one website. They’d have to individually block every node if they want to crawl the web for email addresses to steal. I hope it’s a real thorn in their side.

26 comments

scammers@fuck.off
- One specifically for the Indian scammers
  behen@chod.in
  For all I know that's a real email address 🤣
  
  Knew a guy who did screen printing in college in the engineering program, which had a large Indian population. He put this particular phrase on a shirt and wore it around.
  
  😂 I never knew how that was spelled
At my instance I did setup a email wildcard (receive emails from any address on that domain which don't already have a account) and I get a lot of phishing and scam emails, most of them are send "to" /c/meta@femboys.bar, as link to this community is linked in sidebar, but I also seen emails "send to" random usernames
So yeah, It is happening, i wonder how bad it is on larger instances
- Wow! Thanks for confirming my suspicions.
- The horror! I hope you have a good spam filter
  
  thankfully that is a special mailbox for spam, I sometimes like to come through the emails and see where they submit the data, and maybe submit some data on my own, plus report the issue to website owner/hosting
- I personally love my catch-all email domain. Anything that isn’t addressed to a specific list of addresses lands in a generic secondary inbox. So like I can have a personal inbox with the email address I give to friends, a work inbox for the address I give to clients, and an “everything else” inbox that isn’t associated with either work or personal emails.
  It also allows me to easily identify which companies are selling my info. If I sign up to a Walmart membership with “Walmart@[domain]” and then start seeing a bunch of spam at that address, I know they sold my info to some ad company. I can simply burn that address; I just filter everything from that address straight into spam. And now my inbox is clean again.
  
  Crap, that sounds amazing! Any good resources you'd suggest for getting started with doing that?
- I was searching for this, but how can you do a wildcard account which will just receive mails from all aliases?
  
  it depends on your email provider/server, search under term "catch-all" or alias. I'm using a self hosted email on hestiacp, which have a option under domain email settings
Spammers don't care.. they have a list of millions of addresses and blast through them.. lots are deleted, never existed, or just garbage.
The people that run the email server they are using to send the mail care very much, but in most cases they are not the same people.
When I first started on lemmy during the great exodus and I was still trying to wrap my head around federation, I saw a hexbea(.net) account and straight up thought this dude was using some random email
They also monitor new website registrations and immediately spam info@newdomain
Would be interesting to set up email servers on some of the more popular instances and see how much traffic they're actually getting.
Wondering 💭 how many of spams have been caught.

26 comments