This morning I got an email from a Cora, on behalf of Acebeam, to my personal email address. She wanted to draw my attention to a few new Acebeam lights. I don’t own any Acebeam lights, nor have I ever asked any information about them. All of my contacts with manufacturers and sellers go via forum PM’s, or their own messager. So I’m quite certain I have never given Acebeam my personal email address.
At the same time I got a question from Manker on the same email address to review the (clearance) light I just bought from them. They have my email address because I bought the light directly from them.
Did anything simular happen on your private email addresses?
You are a flashaholic if you are forced to come out of the closet, to make room for more flashlights.
Did I ever get spam e-mail ? Yes
I’m not upset about receiving the mail. It is about the question how they knew where to send it.
You are a flashaholic if you are forced to come out of the closet, to make room for more flashlights.
Is it your Paypal email account?
Yes, that is the same email address, but I’ve never bought or asked anything from them.
You are a flashaholic if you are forced to come out of the closet, to make room for more flashlights.
If you give your email to one Chinese company – Banggood, Gearbest, Manker, anyone – you should assume the whole of China has your details. Your email, address, purchases, everything.
That’s just the nature of China. Privacy, data protection, GDPR etc are alien concepts to to them. It is the wild west.
If you want to know where the leak came from you need to use a unique email address for every site. You can do this with some email providers. Then when you get some spam to that address and you know which site leaked it. But even then, if you know that eg Bangood has leaked your address, what are you going to do ? Write a stern email ?
Well, they might offer you 10 BG points.
I once clicked a link in a search engine to an LL Bean store page for a pair of gloves. I looked at the page for about 10 seconds and closed it. I didn’t click anything, create any accounts, or make any purchases. The following week, I received an LL Bean catalog in my mailbox, addressed to me by name. This is the world we live in today.
That sure would lift up my day
You are a flashaholic if you are forced to come out of the closet, to make room for more flashlights.
Got a similar mail from Manker (also clearance sale/review), but none from Acebeam. Might be coincidence.
Spitzbube.
Got the exact same PM from Cora of Acebeam this morning, I can also confirm that it was lifted from payment information.
As long as it stays withing Acebeam, I’m ok, it’s when it goes viral to other vendors that I would get upset.
On the light side.
https://10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html
offers a free email address good for only 10 minutes, long enough for a website to get you to “verify” it. Then it evaporates.
Or, use one of the free email services or a paid service (I like Sneakemail) to have a unique email address for every contact you make.
Then as noted above, you can tell who leaks it, and you can cancel it so whoever’s spamming it just gets bounces.
Yeah, I know, “reply by ICBM” is the option I really want for spammers, but it’s not available until we recognize spammers as terrorists.
Another thing you should, or could do is signing up with a Gmail address and add the site name where you sign up for. You need to add a Plus + symbol behind your name, succeeded by the name of the site you sign up for, and before the @ mark.
For example: myname+blf@gmail.com
This only works for gmail though.
You can add the name of the website behind the + symbol, and all emails will be delivered to your email box myname@gmail.com
SO you can have:
myname+cpf@gmail.com ,
myname+banggood@gmail.com,
myname+gearbest@gmail.com,
If any of these vendors sell your email address, you should be able to see WHO sold your email address since you added their site name to your email address.
This is a nice trick!
The Eneloop 2005-2022 info thread
Nice trick indeed. Thanks
I just tried the + trick but 2 out of 3 pages wouldn’t allow the + sign as part of the address
USB power meter/tester thread
I just use email accounts I create strictly for shopping/registering/etc so it doesn’t bother me when spam/offers get sent to them.
How about write a stern post online, and then block incoming mail from that address?
Sometimes I can’t believe that generations of people alive right now lived through having their name, address and phone number published publicly. Not sure when their feelings shifted so much.
When vendors started offering slightly better prices in exchange for their soul.
When that information was spread farther and wider than any generations before had ever experienced.
"This too shall pass." -- Ancient Persian saying
It used to be quite expensive to copy info out of phone books, transfer it to paper, stick it on junk mail and pay postage to deliver it to people.
The problem isn’t that the information became available.
The problem is that it became dirt cheap to use it, leading to a vast proliferation of junk mail.
Cheaper than dirt, really.
https://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/
Equifax breach and others have put out a lot worse than that. My college alumni magazine once printed mailing labels with Social Security #s on them. Yahoo, Target, etc., the list goes on.
I have a domain registered through Google, that I use as an email forward. Anything that gets sent to anything @mysupersecretdomain.com gets forwarded to an email address I use.
This way if I am asked for an email address somewhere, I can make one up off the top of my head, or usually the name of the company asking for my email, and I can see when that email address gets shared.
For example, I signed up at Neal’s Gadgets with an email address of ng@ whatever my domain is.com, and noticed that I’m getting emails from Indigo Temple to that address. Never used it anywhere else.
The reasons not to buy from Neal’s Gadgets just keep growing by the day.
they need to stop doing this.
...where Frugal meets with Flashlight!
つ ◕_◕ ༽つ
Only after you send pictures and then a video of the problem.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Oooohhhhh I will sure send them a video worth 10 BG.
Life Pro-tip: Dispute EVERYTHING you can on your credit report. There are many circumstances that will get items removed if you dispute them, but employees of credit agencies are not allowed to inform you of these conditions.
Equifax is probably the worst company/organization I have or will ever deal with in my life. Getting a certain verification number off my credit report from them, just to file a dispute took months.
I still think I only got resolution because whoever I finally spoke to on the phone was competent and had empathy for me.
I challenge anyone to find a single person who has been able to get their free online credit report from them, which is everyone’s right under federal law. They are scamming people into paying or waiting weeks or more for a mailed form (which didn’t even include the number Equifax said it would, and which I needed to file the dispute). Debt collection agencies are almost as bad, the one I filed a claim against said they had definitive proof of my debt but never provided me with that evidence and lost the dispute within a week of filing. A medical debt which was supposedly from when I was still a minor and they never contacted me to try and collect
Genuine question, what is the practical difference?