Privacy Concerns from Misspelling an Email Address?

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 36 points – 12 months 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?

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.

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

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.

Well, yes it works: https://proton.me/support/creating-aliases

I've got a slightly different tale regarding privacy & emails misspellings. I have an email account that is first.last@domain.com 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.

Dang. I hold my own firstlast@domain.com and haven't gotten squat. Guess mine is even less common.

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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

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.

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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.

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

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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