HN Explorer

Tell HN: I have received SPAM on my HN email

20 points by cassianoleal ↗ HN
I have just received a SPAM email on the account I use solely for signing in to Hacker News.

Here is a paste link of the redacted raw email: https://pastebin.com/F63w3ZDC

I have not opened any remote content so I don't actually know what's in it.

18 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 49.5 ms ] thread
dewey
It's not your "HN" email address, it's the address you choose to put in your public HN profile (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cassianoleal) so someone just scraped public HN accounts and sent unsolicited spam emails. Just like it happens with Github all the time.
[dead] cassianoleal
cassianoleal
Welp, it looks like that email was in my profile's `about:` box. I don't know how it ended up there but I don't recall doing it myself.
stark98
You should consider buying CO detector, I'm not even joking
cassianoleal
Carbon Monoxide? :)

Thanks for the suggestion but I have a couple AQMs and the CO in my house is usually 0.

If I did put my email there it was quite a while ago. It's not hard to forget something you did/saw once a long time ago and never looked at again.

dewey
> That's untrue. I never made that choice. That's the email I use to sign-in to the service and I have no way of making it private.

False, your HN account email is private (The "email" field if you look at your profile).

That's the reason why people often comment "put your email in the about field so I can contact you". People falsely assume the account email is public.

cassianoleal
You're right, although I don't recall adding it there. It may have been an oversight on my part though.

I have now removed it from there and will blackhole that account.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
reustle
Are you sure the email in his profile isn’t different？
gpas
But the email we use to login is not public, only admins can see it. How does it work with github?
dewey
Github has a public email field, and you can also scrape the commit authors.
liveoneggs
looks like HN headlines to me. Great newletter ;)
dewey
A newsletter that's sent without anyone signing up for it is not a newsletter, it's spam.

For a great HN newsletter I'd suggest the curated one that always re-surfaces some interesting links: http://hackernewsletter.com

mellonaut
This is an email you posted to your _public_ profile in a community of tens(?) of thousands, consisting mainly of engineers and businesses people marketing to engineers. What did you expect?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cassianoleal
It looks like that email address was public on my profile's about box. I don't recall putting it there but it's possible I did it in the past and forgot.

Feel free to downvote this post into oblivion. :)

Thanks for those who helped me figure this out!

troydavis
Take a minute to report it to the sender's email service providers as well. Based on the link tracking, it appears to have been sent from elasticemail.com (abuse@elasticemail.com).