Email address being compromised - what can be done?

savemon3y

Hi,

I will lay out exactly what happened.

Whenever I register for an account with any online website, I always create a new email address (I own the domain). In this case, it was [EMAIL="chemistdirect&#64;<my"]chemistdirect@<my[/EMAIL] domain> which is the email address I created when I registered on www[dot]chemistdirect[dot]co[dot]uk a few months ago.

I have never used this email address to send/received emails.

I do this to ensure that if my email address is used without my authorisation, I can clamp down on it.

Today, I received an email from somebody (which looked like spam) to this email address. I then contacted the above company to inform them, asking them if they wanted to see the original email I received and what they are going to do about it (I couldn't send them the email as they only had an online 'contact us' form).

I have received a response from the company which really didn't answer the question:

"Sorry but we are not aware of this and we do not have that email address which must be spam."

There was no signature etc on the email and nobody signed it off!

Normally, I would just set up a rule to junk all future emails to my email address. However, in this case, as they are a registered online pharmacy I am concerned that a subset of their database could have been compromised (which contains people's prescriptions etc and their personal details) and the lack of action in their response (IMO I was expecting a more structured response than the above).

Does anyone know what can be done regarding the above - or is it just not worth bothering about?

NeverAgain_2

I think the spam email generator has happened to generate your email address.

As such, it's not worth worrying about.

I believe the generators try combinations using words/names which do exist.

One way to combat that is to use a password-style address, and for further protection, a password-style domain name.

If I'm right, Fgi67.dXw8re@bn6.9qsT3-rG5dp.co.uk is unlikely to get a lot of spam.