A Mastodon account is an email to spammers

This morning I received a spam email where the spammer accidentally CCed everyone, instead of BCCing them. They also seemed to have spammed many people named Donncha, so hopefully none of them reply-all asking to unsubscribe.

It’s not the first time, but they included an “email address” that isn’t an email address. They used my @donncha@mastodon.ie Mastodon account. They also included my Gmail address, which is how I received the email.

A screenshot showing the text:
donncha.o
donncha.o
donncha.o
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donncha@
donnchagi
donnchah‹
donncham

I started receiving email to this blog’s @donncha@odd.blog address and to photoblog’s @donncha@inphotos.org address too, but I’ve blocked them already.

Screenshot from Fastmail showing an email alias is disabled.

If you publish the address of your self-hosted Mastodon account, you might want to make sure you don’t have an email address there too, or you’ll start to get unwelcome emails.

BTW – you should pay for your email, especially if you have self-hosted domains. Fastmail is great. Here’s the post I wrote about Fastmail when I switched over last year.

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Published by Donncha

Donncha Ó Caoimh is a software developer at Automattic and WordPress plugin developer. He posts photos at In Photos and can also be found on Mastodon.

2 thoughts on “A Mastodon account is an email to spammers

  1. I’m not yet well-versed into how the fediverse works, so I’m not surprised that I’m not sure how the Mastodon email address (that isn’t an email address) was going to work. (Unless I misread it and it didn’t actually work?)

    As for self-hosting email, I’ve been the free Google Apps user since forever, and I recently switched to the paid version after Google threatened to pull the plug. I have so many important emails in there that I wouldn’t dare moving my email elsewhere for the foreseeable future.

    For my secondary, less-important emails, I find Zoho Mail to be a cheap alternative. I host about 8 domains on their $12/month plan. (Those domains are basically aliases, but it’s a good way to have separate email addresses that all feed into a single inbox.)

    1. A Mastodon account is like email, in that it’s user @ server.tld, but the convention for writing them is @user @ server.tld. On Twitter you’d say my username is @username but the Fediverse is distributed so you add a domain too. 🙂

      Haven’t heard of Zoho, but good to see more paid email services thriving when Gmail is free!

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