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.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
31 points (97.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
35834 readers
1341 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
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.
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=toolpage
So 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.