EMail Parrot

Stop Oversharing Your Email Address

Every few months we hear about a “data breach” at some internet company or organization. The end users’ exposure from these breaches are variable depending on what information was taken. In virtually all these cases users' real names and email addresses are obtained. In other cases, companies are caught sharing peoples’ names and email addresses to data brokers.

While online companies have been a vector for loss of email privacy, they are in general, trying to protect identities and are often being held accountable for their mistakes. I’m not writing today to talk about this risk. It is our sharing of our personal email addresses to friends, acquaintances, and just about anyone else on the internet. It is this self imposed risk to personal privacy I want to confront.

All these losses of privacy are important and can lead to real harm. With just a name and email address hackers and identity thieves are halfway to stealing your money, reputation, and/or identity.

“(W)hat can someone do with your email address? A lot, it turns out. Your email address contains enough information about you for hackers to cause serious damage to your personal life and finances.” - https://www.rd.com/list/what-hackers-can-do-with-email-address/. “... you should be selective about where and to whom you give your email address, experts say.

Freely sharing your email address can lead to it falling into the wrong hands, resulting in being flooded with annoying marketing emails or becoming a victim of a hacker. Then these bad actors can use this information to carry out a wide range of harmful activities.”

People with your email address don’t need to be malicious to do you harm, though this does happen. If one person you have emailed with has their email account hacked, your name, email address, any other address book information about you, and emails you have sent will be in the hands of the hackers. Their attention will now fall on you and your online accounts. You will at a minimum see increased spam, phishing attacks, and other unwanted emails. At worst, they will gain access to your online accounts by impersonating you.

“Your email is the starting point for many identity thieves.” - https://www.aura.com/learn/what-to-do-if-a-scammer-has-your-email-address#:~:text=A%20hacker%20gets%20your%20email,you%20to%20a%20phishing%20website.

Your close family and personal friends are likely to inform and warn you if their account is breached. This will give you a heads up on incoming attacks. Also our circle of close relationships is smaller than everyone we email with. These contacts are not the most fruitful places to limit our exposure and doing so will have a significant impact on our ability to communicate. It is likely good to review how to detect if a friend’s email account has been hacked - https://heresthethingblog.com/2012/04/16/6-telltale-signs-friends-email/.

It is the much larger group of contacts of distant relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, and others in the periphery of our online presence that pose the greater risk. Social groups, HOAs, church groups, volunteer groups and interest groups all use email lists for organizing and communicating. These groups often have large memberships and relatively low vetting to join. These large meshes of email users are a gold mine for hackers.

There are a number of ways to protect yourself in these cases each with different trade-offs. You could:

• Never send emails to these groups, just read. This would need to be combined with an email solution that protects the addresses of those on the distribution (BCC distributions for example). The drawback of this is that your input won’t be heard, impacting your contribution and the value of the group to others.
• Move your group discussions to a non-email based solution. This faces resistance from members, limits the timeliness of notifications, has additional privacy concerns, and often increases exposure when additional information, such as mobile phone number, are required.
• Move your group to an anonymizing email reflector. These solutions hide the sender’s email address from the recipients of any emails. Until recently this required setting up an email server to perform the email forwarding function.

It is this last option, in my opinion, that holds the most promise of improving the risk associated with email discussion groups. EMail Parrot (https://emparrot.com) hides the sender’s email address while also indicating which member sent the email with a nom de plume. It also protects members by not allowing non-members to use the group, removes dangerous attachments, is simple to establish, and delivered at a low price.

EMail Parrot should be used by any group using personal email addresses to communicate. Social activity groups, community groups, parenting groups, school groups, and many other email groups are putting their members at risk and don’t know that an alternative has arrived. EMail Parrot is the solution that email groups need to protect member email addresses and through reduced exposure, increase member participation.