Since email addresses are not made public on Fluther, how do spammers get them?

It could be from an bot that accesses people’s contact lists on their mobile and/or their FB for spam, and whoever got hit had the emails of the three of you. I don’t think it was from Fluther.

Eek, that’s creepy… I hope it wasn’t through Fluther!

Well, neither Ninjacolin nor Cameron have my email address. And as far as I can recall I haven’t even PMed them either.

And Cameron is one of the tech guys on staff, right?

Yeah, this is really creepy. I’m hoping one of the founder guys can see this and weigh in here.

It has to be from Fluther because I really have no other connection to either of the other two.

I suppose that the SN of Cameron might not be that unique, but how many other Ninjacolins could there be other than at Fluther?

I have no idea @Buttonstc. I would agree with @hearkat, that seems the most likely scenario but if they aren’t in your contact list – I don’t have a clue. I haven’t ever had any ‘Fluther’ generated spam.

I have been spammed recently by a former Fluther mod’s old email address. I didn’t think to look at the other recipients, but if I had to guess, I’d say her email addy got hacked (it was a preexisting email address that she decided to use for moderation emails, so nothing Fluther can really do about it, unfortunately.) If you PM me with the sender’s email address, I can let you know if it’s the same one. I planned to notify her that it’s happening, and will make sure I do.

Can you shoot me a quick email so I don’t have to try rooting through my gmail archives for yours it’s not that easy on iPhone :)

@Buttonstc Sure. :)

I wasn’t suggesting that you or they were on each other’s contact list… rather, someone else who had all three of you on their list got hacked. Looks like Auggie has a suspicion who that might have been, too.

OK I see what you mean now. I just didn’t read carefully enough :)

I forwarded it to Auggie so hopefully she’ll get it figured out soon.

Yep, it was exactly as I suspected. An old mod’s old email got hacked. She’s already locked it down, so it shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Thanks for your prompt attention to this, Auggie.

And here’s a silly question:
What exactly did she do to “lock it down” and shouldn’t she have been doing it all along?

Just a thought…

@Buttonstc She disabled the email address, so it can no longer be used (by her, a hacker, or anyone). I can’t say why she hadn’t disabled the account prior to that, but I know that I didn’t disable my ancient AOL email address either, because I had it set to forward any emails to my gmail account. It ended up getting hacked, too (though I’d never used it for Fluther business, so that wasn’t a concern). At least she could get gmail to disable the account…AOL wouldn’t even let me sign in to tell them to disable mine! They finally did it on their own.