this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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Use the "passwords" feature to check if one of yours is compromised. If it shows up, never ever reuse those credentials. They'll be baked into thousands of botnets etc. and be forevermore part of automated break-in attempts until one randomly succeeds.

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[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 29 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

This trick is common enough and trivial to reverse engineer. I can just purge my billion-email-address hacked list of all characters between a + and an @ and have a clean list that untraceable with your system.

[–] AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.world 10 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Right? Has this ever worked for anyone? I've never bothered because of how easy it is for spammers to bypass.

[–] Scubus@sh.itjust.works 16 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Spammers go for the easiest targets. If you do stuff like this, they might redesign their system to make it LESS likely to send to you. Keep in mind theyre targetting the elederly, mentally handicapped, and the emotionally desperate. They specifically DO NOT want to target the educated, technologically literate, and those that will waste their time. By attempting to technologically limit them from their scams, you make it more difficult for them to target you and it makes it obvious theyre not worth your time.

Its not about making yourself scam proof, its about making yourself an unappealing target.

(This all applies to scam emails, dunno if it has any effect if the goal is phishing but i would imagine so. If they can phish 5 people in the time it takes to phish you, youre no longer their target.)

Edit: this is why scam emails look obviously scammy, with misspelled words and grammarical errors. Its not a mistake, its an attempt to preemptively weed out people who want to waste their time