Comments on: The Dangers of Email Addresses in RSS Feeds

By: Shimon Rura’s Blog » An Email Leak in Frassle

Shimon Rura’s Blog » An Email Leak in Frassle — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:47:42 +0000

[...] link [...]

By: Kahloz

Kahloz — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:06:27 +0000

There’s a Konfabulator Widget that shares “Throw away” email accounts to popular sites; you can even create one and share it.

By: Derik

Derik — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:54:59 +0000

Mike, that is simply brilliant. My question is though, do you write down these addresses to track them back to the source?

By: planetmike

planetmike — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 17:09:11 +0000

You should use more than just the domain name when you create a unique email address. Someone else could make you think your address is being sold simply by trying different domains. See http://f79f65a2ea59016f063cb987424ed7b2.PlanetMike.com for details on how I register at web sites. Mike

By: Heather Meadows

Heather Meadows — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 16:33:04 +0000

That is a really cool idea, to use email addresses specific to the service.

By: Derik

Derik — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 13:35:12 +0000

Thanks Simon, I will be updating the article!

By: Shimon Rura

Shimon Rura — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 13:30:00 +0000

Derik,

Frassle does not sell email addresses; the addresses are being picked up from RSS feeds by spammers. By default, frassle uses your registration email address for the RSS 2.0 managingEditor and webMaster elements, so your email address becomes public.

Of course, it’s not good enough to be simply negligent rather than malicious, so I’ve removed these two elements from the RSS feeds frassle generates. Eventually, I might make it an option to turn these on, but if you take a look at your RSS feed now: http://frassle.net/Directory/rss?id=3329 it should not contain your email address.

Thanks for alerting me to the issue, and if you think the change I made addresses the problem, I’d appreciate it if you updated the title of your blog post. While I am sorry frassle made this mistake, we don’t sell email addresses and never will.

Shimon Rura, creator and maintainer of frassle.

By: shimonolog: Shimon Rura's Blog - frassle

shimonolog: Shimon Rura's Blog - frassle — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

RSS generation so that these two elements are omitted. The RSS feed should no longer disclose your email address, and I don’t believe this information is disclosed anywhere else in the system. Derik also commented that he’ll be changing his blog post, “Frassle Sells Your Email” (update: now “The Dangers of Email Addresses in RSS Feeds”) , to clarify that this is a mistake that’s been corrected. I stand by my promise to never sell your email address or personal information. posted to /frassle/announcements

By: Planet d00dism

Planet d00dism — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 16:00:00 +0000

t use any of those services personally. I recently made a domain and when I sign up at a new site, I use the name of the service in the email. When I start to receive spam at that address, I have a good idea of who sold my address (though it’s not perfect ). Mike takes it a step further. My only qualm with Mike’s method is that because you use a hash, you need to record which hashes match up with what services. However, not everyone is so blessed to own their own domain name. Given, you can probably