Spam! Is Purism selling my email address?

I am a person who is pretty good about avoiding spam and my long time Gmail account only gets about one spam message per a day on average in the spam folder. That is until late last week and am now getting like 50+ spam messages a day. All in the spam folder but still annoying.

The entity I gave my email address to just before all this happened? Purism! I donated $20 towards the Librem 5 phone effort (you are welcome) but now am getting spammed to death. I am not saying Purism is doing it directly as they could be using a 3rd party for payments and maybe they are screwing them?

Anyway, has anyone else noticed an up tick in spam after giving money for a pre-order or donation to Purism?

Hi @oldtimefighter,

I ordered a Librem 5 and did not get any sort of spam. I bet that is an unfortunate coincidence, I highly doubt that Purism would let a third party spam you :slight_smile:

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I have given purism my email and i have not received any sort of spam. I think it’s just bad luck and timing.

In case you’ve recently installed smth or went on untrusted websites it could have injected some sort of passive trackers/keyloggers/malicious code into your browser/PC and then you went ahead and typed these details in Purism’s website (could be any other) and thus exposed what you wrote and sent that to someone’s server. Rarely happens but it’s not smth surreal.

Purchased a librem13 a few weeks ago and have not seen any increase I could relate to Purism. I feel like spam has increased recently but I get a lot of spam. if I had to list the possible reasons for an increase in spam Purism would not make the list. I could be wrong but selling super secure laptops with a distro based on security is a real tell that they would not sell email addresses of their customers and supporters.

No, that is not the case.

It could be a coincidence but I had that Gmail account for 14 years now and went from 1 spam a day to 50+ in a day overnight. I don’t give out the address often but trying to remember if there was anyone else besides Purism gave it to recently. No, Purism wouldn’t “let” a 3rd-party spam their customers. I would assume they wouldn’t know about it.

If you had an increase in spam, it might make sense to check your email account in haveibeenpwned.com to see if you were included in any one of the enormous data breaches lately.

Thanks but I am already very familiar with that resource. AGAIN, this is not a malware/hacked issue but I gave my email to someone I shouldn’t have problem.

Imagine that a contact of yours (or anyone who has you in their address book) installed an app… and the app has access to their contacts… Presto. That could do it.

Imagine 1 person did a CC all instead of BCC. Presto there it can happen.

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It’s like you predicted it
https://twitter.com/search?q=ghostery&src=typd

or… maybe you work for ghostery lol (jk)

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Haha. I remember when ghostery was nice. :joy::disappointed_relieved: when it was a good add on like no script cry cry

Definitely no issue with purism and email.

As you have a Gmail account to track who is giving your email use the +something alias feature.
For example: youremail+purism@gmail.com.
You can create an infinite number of variations. Each time you sign somewhere you customize you email.

Then when you are spammed you just have to look at the +something to know right away the origin of your spam.

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