I’m in the process of deGoogling and also shoring up my email privacy, which means I’m hyper aware of mistakes I make, hence the stupid question:

I was testing something with Proton Mail and misspelled the domain—swapped the “r” with one of the neighboring letters.

I didn’t get an email bounceback, which is fine, because you don’t always get a bounceback anyway. But, should I be concerned that I might have just volunteered my email directly to some spam outfit?

The “wrong” domain is registered. I’m acutely aware that the misspelling being one letter away from “Proton” might be intentional to capture misspellings like the one I made. Also, the wrong domain seems to be associated with oopatet.com and trellian.com, which are blocked by ublock.

Is there anything I should do from a privacy perspective?
Or is this a non-issue?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Nougat@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.

        • Nougat@kbin.social
          1·
          1 year ago

          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.
          • reflex@kbin.socialOP
            0·
            1 year ago

            Hey, thanks for the detailed follow-up! I’m guessing out of the three, is the first the worst-case scenario? Would that basically be the hallmarks of an address-harvesting operation?

            Interestingly though, I noticed I did get a “message send failed” error from the Proton app hours after I made the original post. It didn’t look like a standard “NDR.”

            I tried to see if I could get the same thing with a dummy Gmail I have so I sent another email to the same wrong domain. No error from Gmail though.

            Ultimately, I’m wondering if I should be worried about this. Consensus from other responders seems to be no. What are your thoughts on that, out of interest?

            • Nougat@kbin.social
              0·
              1 year ago

              I wouldn’t worry about it. I read elsewhere that you sent a blank email, so the only thing that would be “exposed,” if that’s even the right way to think about it, would be your email address.

              However, based on your report of receiving a “message send failed” from Proton several hours later, I suspect the third is the real condition. There is an MX record; there is no mail server behind the IP for that MX record. When Proton tried to initiate an SMTP exchange at the MX IP, it got no response. Then the item went back into the queue to be retried later. Proton’s timeout must be set to those “several hours” that elapsed between your clicking send and Proton giving up on trying to send. GMail’s timeout may be different; you may yet get an NDR from that one, too.