Suddenly I started receiving a bunch of scam mails (phishing). I suspect some bot or bot-net is involved, because I’ve received maybe a couple hundred e-mails at the time of writing, all from different (likely auto-generated) senders. With anything from 2-10 emails per day.
The scam is essentially just some phishing, all related to the same topic. I’ve mostly been able to mitigate it by filtering out mails containing certain keywords or phrases that show up in the scam mails. However, the mails change relatively often (about once a day) so every now and then something gets through, and I’ll update my filter.
My question is really if there’s any way I can figure out
- Where this is coming from,
- How they got hold of my email
So that I can try to go after the root cause / prevent other scammers from getting hold of it.
subtext@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There’s really nothing to be done about the compromised email address, but I would really recommend using a service that creates unique email addresses per service that you sign up for to mitigate the blast radius when one service gets pwned. It takes a long while, but thankfully privacy laws are stronger now and it’s easier to force a company to either delete your information or change the email they have for you.
Some potential services to consider include:
addy.io
proton.me/pass/aliases
www.fastmail.com/features/masked-email/
support.apple.com/guide/icloud/…/icloud
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Thanks! I’ll definitely look into that, though the only issue I can imagine is keeping track of which email that goes to which service (I’m one of those kinds of people that uses “Forgot my password” effectively as a password manager, don’t hate me for it, I have reasons).
jqubed@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is also a good reason to use an actual password manager
nokturne213@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
subtext@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They all have a system for keeping track of that, I know iCloud automatically assigns a URL to each based on where you created it, or Fastmail (which I use) has a comment field and automatically tags each email as it comes to your inbox.
It takes more than zero effort to create it, so it’s too much effort for my wife, but I absolutely love it.
lurch@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
yahoo mail also offers disposable email addresses