Public Handle Names and Spam

Well, Techcrunch talks about how the entire MobileMe user email list can be literally scraped off of the site by crawling the public pages for all users. Ofcourse the problem there is that the username is shared publicly (as part of the url) and more importantly, it is tied to the email address, thus making it easy for spammers to collect and accurately compile a list of active email addresses.

This led me to think about a slightly more general problem. Think about your handle name for a second. I go by akshayjava on pretty much every social network, bookmarking site and any and every site that I register at. I am attached to this username and I like it very much. It is very much a part of my online identity. The only problem is that if you know my handle (which is not too hard to find online) you can guess with a pretty good chance that my email address is also tied to the same handle.

I went to my Twitter account and pulled up a list of users who, like me, are fervent Gmail fans. For many of these users Gmail is their primary email address. Of the 15 such folks (close friends/colleagues) I knew at least 12 of their gmail addresses can be matched EXACTLY using their twitter id. And for one person, his friendfeed username can be matched with the gmail id. And one is an uber geek who the only person I know who is THAT paranoid about privacy. 

So I think the problem is that the handle names can be inherently sensitive to spam.

PS: Thankfully, gmail's spam filters do a pretty good job - so much so, that I now forward my official school email to gmail and let it filter all the junk. Due to spam, I have given up on my Yahoo acount totally and declared email bankrupcy there! Yep, you guessed it --- its [email protected]... eat this spammers!

Comments

[AJ]

Wow! I had been thinking about the same thing for so long now. My online handle is different from my actual name too.

This also makes me wonder how easy it is to guess my future choices of domains/login ID's? And also, if this is so closely linked to me, then anyone can create a profile with this handle and do very bizarre/offensive stuff with that ID.

Guess virtual world needs new laws which are not just flexible but brand new for this world.