This spammer told an university that i agree to get email communications

Moonrise2473@feddit.it to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 315 points –

The university allows URLs as a "person name", so the spammer bots filled forms everywhere filling with my email and the spam URL as my name. So i'm getting bombarded by "legit" emails with a spam url as in "hi SPAM_URL"

30

I think this is a tactic scammers use to make you miss some other important email like online purchases. I'd comb through those emails carefully if I were you.

If you're getting flooded with emails from legitimate sites asking for email address confirmation or password resets, you may be getting hit with a "registration bomb."

If you have something compromised, they'll do this to try and hide the email you should actually be worried about in a flood of email that isn't stopped by the spam filters because they're from legitimate sources.

I recently woke up to thousands of emails about newsletter registrations, password reset requests, free trial notices, etc. Amongst the deluge of unwanted email was a notification about a new user being added to my PayPal account. If I hadn't read through the emails I would have lost a lot of money.

Now i'm getting tons of "Dear SPAM_URL, thanks for confirming your attendance at the conference"...

Little Bobby Tables at it again

Hold on, English is dumb as fuck, is "an university" correct?

I would guess this person pronounces it like "ooniversity" in which case it's correct, it depends on if there's a vowel or consonant sound, not what letter it is. But I never heard it pronounced that way, for me it's always been "youniversity" and in that case it's incorrect.

It's a university. Don't ask me why.

Because an precedes a word that starts with a vowel sound, not just because they start with a vowel letter

No although it should be, an is used in place of proceeding a vowel

The correct usage is "a university" because the pronunciation of "university" begins with a consonant sound.

an is used in place of proceeding a vowel

Proceeding a vowel sound. The actual spelling is irrelevant.

He was an honest man, an hourly worker, and an heir to the throne. He rode a unicorn to a university, and oddly he was a eunuch.

Perfectly explains why so many officials say "today is an historic event"

Not. Lol fuck these rules.

"an historic" only works in some accents. British, for example, pronounces it as "istoric".

Edit: un-mis-spelling

Thank you I did not know this but this makes perfect sense based on my intuition

OP is Italian. The u in the Italian word for university, universitá, is said with a vowel 'ooh' sound instead of a consonant 'you' sound. I'd wager they remember their English 'a vs an' rule phonetically and, with the words being so similar between languages, mixed the pronunciation up. I'm a native English speaker and that's 100% how I fuck up my Italian.

In Latin langs, y sounds like i (e sound), so that's probably where the confusion comes from.

It's debatable, technically it does start with a vowel so "an" should be used, but since it starts with a Y consonant sound, using "a" sounds a lot better and may also be considered correct/better.

Not really debatable, that's the actual rule. An before words that start with a vowel sound.

'An' is used before any vowel. An opposite, an electrician, an icehouse, an apple.

Yes, but no. Your rule is correct, but the application of it isn’t. “An” is used for vowel sounds.
University (you-knee-ver-city), UFO (you-eff-ooh) use “a”, while honorable (on-oohr-a-bul) uses “an”.
Confusing language for sure.

I think you should blurr your phone too

luckily it's a random number that the spambot inserted in the form

Possibly not actually his phone, could just be the scam's phone

I'm totally signing him up for the all my favorite shelters... they send cat and dog photos to your phone.

That would be extremely dangerous for someone with an overactive sense of empathy and limited impulse control.

It's annoying. Putup a filter moving mail to spam if "hi https" is found in body.

also contact admins. This is some bad input validation :)