Privacy Concerns from Misspelling an Email Address?

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 36 points – 1 years ago

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?

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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.

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