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Comment by xer0x | Hacker News Reader

Holy crap Dropbox's moderators make me want to terminate my account with them.

Reading that thread was painful. I always use custom one-off email addresses for services I sign-up for and. When I've attempted to report disclosure of my email address I'm almost always met with major skepticism. It's maddening.

I used to enjoy the reactions I'd get from store clerks and telephone reps when I give them my email address. "Oh, how you have an email address with our company name in it?" In recent years the reactions have turned kinda hostile, "What is your connection with our company?" and once "You can't have our company name in your email address." I gave up fighting and now I just use random strings.

I recently had to sit through a customer rep read a 32 character long alphanumspecial email address out to me for "security reasons". Bet she was glad I didn't use usicode.

You might consider just picking one or two random words from the dictionary.

That sounds like a fun idea for an app/service. You provide it with your base email address or custom domain and it generates a couple random words and keeps track of what service you used it to sign up for.

I spent a little time thinking about this concept and how it relates to just having dummy account you control, for giving to services you don't fully trust.

As long as you use a secure password, and you don't use the same one. I don't see alot of difference, but the ability to sandbox each service to a list of email accounts, so that the attacker never knows the master account, would be an extra layer of security.

Utility exists here. I just don't think there's enough utility to justify the work.

A better option might be integrating it into LastPass or 1Password. They already generate a random password for you, why not an email address as well?

I use something similar already. I've a domain that is used purely for my email. Normal addresses like webmaster@ are rejected. A script on the server takes the domain I am registering for a service on (eg "google.com"), generates an random-looking but deterministic address, and creates an alias for that address to my real inbox.

End result is that everyone gets a unique email that can't be guessed, I can nuke an address as soon as it starts sending me spam (often) and my true inbox is typically completely clean.

I initially made the mistake of trusting my bank and utility billing systems with my real address. Turns out my power company had their database compromised, and when I called to inform them they refused to believe me (like Dropbox).

A good five years ago I got two phishing emails to two unique addresses that I had used to contact a local bank. They also refused to believe me, and it was basically my fault for not securing my computer. Somehow.

Well that's terrifying.

Acme Inc's employees being suspicious of people with "acme" in their email address is probably, on the whole, a good thing. It smells like a phishing scam to people who don't know about throwaways.

It is actually possible that you violate their tos by doing so - it could be construed as falsely implying some representation of the company. A stretch to any sane person, though any typical terms document contains miles and miles of cya.

I just tell them it makes it easier for me to find their e-mails.

Wow. That sounded a lot like I wrote it. Sounds like the same story line I've experienced. :)

If I'm at Toys R Us or something, I'll just be like uh... "tru25@<mydomain>.com" so they don't question me. (Also, I chose Toys R Us as an example because when I went to sign up for a loyalty program, and they typed in "toysrus@<mydomain>.com" their cash register black screened and rebooted... !)

That's what rot13 was created for.

dropbox email -> qebcobk@yourdomain.com

Those mods don't work for Dropbox, they are community volunteers who've just been given mod permissions.

IOW, they work for Dropbox, they just don't get paid for it.

That's why they are volunteers.

That didn't work out so perfectly for AOL.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_Community_Leader_Program

Wait, what? Volunteering in general or even open source or community software projects makes plenty of sense, but why the hell would anyone volunteer for a private for-profit like Dropbox?

Is it some kind of internship scam?

Some customers really like the product and don't mind helping out other users on forums for free. Happens all over the place on forums of all types.

Yikes. What a terrible idea to place your brand's reputation in the hands of people that don't hesitate to make assumptions about your customers' intelligence. Adobe allows certain users to speak as "Pros" on their help boards based on their past helpfulness, which has gotten out of hand before, but they certainly make the distinction between staff and user in the nameplate so people know not to associate them with the company itself.

Is the point of volunteering to put it on your résumé for future employment opportunities in customer service?

Official employees have "Dropboxer" or something similar as their title.

It's pretty much how the Apple support forums work.

That doesn't matter in the slightest.

This is the company's OFFICIAL forum, and therefore the conduct of the appointed "moderators" reflects that of the company.

In the absence of any other information, any reasonable person would assume that the "Moderators" are Dropbox employees.

Not if said person isn't actually employed by the company.

For all intents and purposes, they represent Dropbox. It is poor choice of Dropbox to let themselves be represented by unqualified, unvetted people and then distance themselves from it "because they are not getting paid". They work for Dropbox, they just do it for free.

I call this "Google effect". Some companies started to think they can have crappy customer support because Google's support is crappy and Google is doing great. Actually Google is doing great despite their crappy support.

While it's an interesting idea, you're basically just basing that on a load of unfounded assumptions about the people who manage these companies.

Google's support tends to be nonexistent rather than outright hostile. There's quite a difference.

I don't know what is more infuriating. Having some incompetent fool that I can argue with or not even being able to initiate contact.

At least the former inspires hope that it could potentially lead somewhere.

Amazon is even worse, especially for their sellers. They really don't care about their sellers at all and use bots/autoresponders for virtually all support.

Is that actually the case? I'm a Amazon Prime user (I mention that because I buy almost everything from Amazon :) and I whenever I got in touch with Amazon (Germany) the support was top notch and my issue was resolved very quickly. I am just a buyer though.

Amazon customer service for their buyers is pretty great, in my experience. I broke my Kindle (stepped on it) and they sent me a brand new one, no questions asked. I've heard stories that their customer service for seller is terrible, however.

Nathan C was doing okay. It's hard when there's a bunch of mods leaping in with irrelevant stuff.

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