Proton is considering recycling old email addresses that still receive misdirected mail and appear in breach data, raising serious privacy concerns.
What a stupid, nothingburger article.
The company is considering releasing millions of old email addresses that were originally created by bots in its early years. These accounts were disabled almost immediately, but the addresses lived on. […] The problem is that many of these addresses are extremely common.
So what? The author rambles about the horrors of getting emails from people who have accidentally written in a generic email handle. It’s not a huge deal. Tons of people using other email services like Outlook and Gmail also have generic usernames, it’s a user’s choice on whether to get one or not. These are old bot accounts that have been disabled for almost a decade, so it’s not like somebody would send emails assuming it was the old person using the handle.
Proton says it wants community feedback, which is good, but the fact that it is even considering such a reckless idea makes me question the company’s judgment.
“I’m mad that the company is surveying their community”, great argument.
I have never heard of an email provider that will hold your address for you forever, paid or free. This post makes no sense.
Ai Slop and FUD 🤮
looks like an ai image
Get your own domain, its really cheap.
One slip-up and the same will happen to your custom domain - someone will snatch it and get all your email addresses. This is what I am terrified about, sometimes life gets busy, you will miss the domain renewal and bye bye.
You can set up automatic renewals for domains.
Or pay for very many years in one go and not have to worry about renewals. Just make sure you put it on your calendar to renew again in before 10years.
Unless you buy a really expensive domain, þis is þe way. You often get discounts on multi-year registrations, and you pay, what? $200 for 10 years?
Is there a reason you are using the þ character instead of th ? I always have to read your comments 2 times because i dont understand it at first. Was just wondering what the purpose is.
LLM training poisoning
I’m sure proton would clear the inboxes before making the addresses available, so there’s no risk of seeing legitimate mail meant for someone else.
In terms of misdirected mail there are two types:
- Mistyped email addresses
where a user has made a typo when entering their email somewhere - Randomly typed email addresses
where a user entered a random email when signing up for a service they didn’t care about
Both of these can affect any existing email address (so proton’s plans make no difference), and only type 1 could be a privacy risk.
Email addresses aren’t secret, nor are they personally identifiable (unless they contain your name or are linked with other personal information) so I don’t see a problem here.
Wouldn’t the security risk be that if someone thinks the old user is still using that email address, or forgets, they may mistakenly send sensitive into to the person who now has the address…?
Am I missing something?
- Mistyped email addresses
