Account email address leaked to spammers

[HenryArmitage]

I have reason to believe that the forum is leaking user email addresses to spammers.
My reason for believing this is that I use customized email addresses for each account I create, and I just got spam email to the address I used for the account here.

Has anybody else experienced this? Can I do anything to prevent this, is there maybe a setting for publicly showing/hiding my address? If there is such a setting, shouldn't it be set by default to not show the address? If there isn't such a facility, possibly the account database could have neen hacked.

[smurphos]

I can see you originally joined back in 2012 and haven't been very active since. The Forum was indeed hacked back in early 2016 and data lost included email addresses linked to accounts at that time.

see -
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3001
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3007

Your profile settings do allow other registered users to send you email via your profile page - but they can't actually see your email address. I've just sent you a test message...

You can change that in User Control Panel / Board Preferences / Edit Global Settings...

[smurphos]

You can also confirm if your email address was included in that breach using - https://haveibeenpwned.com/

[HenryArmitage]

Thanks for the quick reply and very helpful info!
The mail I got doesn't look like the test mail you sent me, but haveibeenpwned indeed says that my email address here is affected.
Sorry for the noise, with a bit more research I probably could have found this out before posting, and you're right, I haven't been active much, since I didn't use Mint for a long time. Maybe again in the future!

[milius]

Same situation here, except that site says: "Good news — no pwnage found!"

[lsemmens]

You can also confirm if your email address was included in that breach using - https://haveibeenpwned.com/

Bugga! I've now got to change my details........