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’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.
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
Your email probably disappeared into some phishing company’s email system if you didn’t get any return email or delivery failure notification. How much of a problem that is depends on how much you and the intended recipient care about random companies knowing your names and email addresses. The worst case scenario is that both of you will receive spam and/or phishing attempts from now on.
If you were an EU company, this could have been classified as da data breach that would need reporting. You aren’t so it’s not an issue, but letting the intended recipient know might be appreciated at least.
letting the intended recipient know might be appreciated at least.
Recipient is me, so no issue there!
How much of a problem that is depends on how much you and the intended recipient care about random companies knowing your names and email addresses.
I suppose I do care—that’s why I’m setting all this stuff up to begin with. But I suppose @KingSlareXIV brings up a good point in that my address might be scraped sooner or later anyway.
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.
If it doesn’t have an MX record, the mail server wil usuallyl try to deliver email at the A record.
It’s possible that some proprietary mail servers don’t notify you of mail they couldn’t deliver, but I would assume that a lack of an NDR means the email went somewhere.
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=toolpageSo 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.
Hey, thanks for the detailed follow-up! I’m guessing out of the three, is the first the worst-case scenario? Would that basically be the hallmarks of an address-harvesting operation?
Interestingly though, I noticed I did get a “message send failed” error from the Proton app hours after I made the original post. It didn’t look like a standard “NDR.”
I tried to see if I could get the same thing with a dummy Gmail I have so I sent another email to the same wrong domain. No error from Gmail though.
Ultimately, I’m wondering if I should be worried about this. Consensus from other responders seems to be no. What are your thoughts on that, out of interest?
I wouldn’t worry about it. I read elsewhere that you sent a blank email, so the only thing that would be “exposed,” if that’s even the right way to think about it, would be your email address.
However, based on your report of receiving a “message send failed” from Proton several hours later, I suspect the third is the real condition. There is an MX record; there is no mail server behind the IP for that MX record. When Proton tried to initiate an SMTP exchange at the MX IP, it got no response. Then the item went back into the queue to be retried later. Proton’s timeout must be set to those “several hours” that elapsed between your clicking send and Proton giving up on trying to send. GMail’s timeout may be different; you may yet get an NDR from that one, too.
Thanks @Nougat!
You are awesome like the Snickers filling. 😊
I’ll keep an eye out for the Goog’ NDR.
