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points by mk89 2 days ago | 0 comments

This explains the amount of spam emails I am receiving in the work email since I switched to Claude. I used to work with copilot which was fine. Now I am getting really a lot of spam emails almost on a daily basis. Absolutely crazy. And they are even personalised with my name and surname, not just "dear customer"...

Stupid me, I thought they somehow had hacked my company database or so... (considering all the cves, attacks happening on a daily basis...).

[–] crazygringo 2 days ago

It almost certainly does not explain it, and is probably just a coincidence.

Claude Code is not sending your email address to websites as a default, or regularly. It is not some automatic header or anything.

Rather, if you are performing certain kinds of research on sites that involves downloading certain kinds of information, like on Wikipedia or the SEC, it supplies your e-mail address when the sites request it as part of their download policy. As part of anti-bot policy. Obviously Claude should have asked for approval first, but Claude isn't out there just spamming your e-mail address in every external request it makes or anything.

Wikipedia and the SEC are not selling your e-mail address to spammers. And these are the two main sites where it has come up.

[–] throwup238 2 days ago

Yep it’s mainly happened to me when I was playing around with the EVE Online API via Claude. The game developer asks everyone to put their emails into the request headers so they can contact users to fix their buggy scripts and stuff.

[–] jchook 2 days ago

FWIW I use an email alias service, so I would be able to tell if anthropic was the source of any of my email spam.

It is not.

[–] mk89 2 days ago

The fact it didn't happen to you it means that maybe you didn't 'curl' the same websites I did.

And to be honest, I don't even know which are they!

If I can find out I might be able to share them.

[–] weird-eye-issue 2 days ago

Everything is logged, it is easy to find whether or not your email was ever even included in any curl requests (very unlikely).

[–] j45 2 days ago

Again, it should ask which email to send if required, or claude should be able to request which email to send when it needs to - it does neither.

This is an awfully leaky issue.

[–] 00deadbeef 2 days ago

What if instead of an email address a site asks it to send every kv pair in your env file as an individual header?

[–] baxtr 2 days ago

But if I wanted to collect data I could just change my website’s download policy and require full name and email?

[–] y1n0 2 days ago

Yes but this was true before Claude existed.

[–] skinfaxi 2 days ago

The difference is that claude won't lie though. You could put whatever email you want in headers to SEC.

[–] post-it 2 days ago

It'll lie if you ask it to.

[–] skinfaxi 2 days ago

Defaults are important. Bots want (read: the makers of models want) to put their signature on commits but not requests.

[–] cs02rm0 1 day ago

Or payment. Maybe to run some crypto mining for a bit first and send the proceeds on.

[–] grey-area 2 days ago

Why does Claude have access to to your email or any other info about the user by default?

[–] oasisbob 1 day ago

I've seen Claude do this for sites which have no policy for customizing UserAgent strings in this way.

[–] mk89 2 days ago

You mentioned only 2 websites you know of.

I burnt a few tokens to get some clarity on this (giving HN as source as well, so there is a reference to this thread):

> This doesn't appear to be Claude Code automatically attaching your email address to every outgoing request. The issue is that Claude has access to your account email in its context and can sometimes include it when generating HTTP requests (e.g. "curl" commands).

> Wikipedia and the SEC were mentioned because they explicitly ask automated clients to identify themselves through the "User-Agent" header, often with contact information. Claude may try to comply with those requirements by inserting your personal email address.

> That's why the leak is probably concentrated on sites with these policies, rather than happening on every website. But Wikipedia and the SEC aren't an exhaustive list (the EVE Online API was also mentioned), and there's no technical guarantee that Claude couldn't include the email in requests to other domains.

> The important distinction is that this appears to be model-generated behavior, not a networking layer automatically adding your email to all requests.

> So "most likely Wikipedia and SEC" is a reasonable hypothesis about where the leak is more likely to occur, not a confirmed limit on where your email could have been exposed.

I do see a lot of times curl being used (in Claude). I don't check all the websites being fetched (shame on me!), but your answer doesn't convince me.

My coincidence is clearly not proof. I am just a random online guy so why trust me. I just shared my recent experience. I used extensively copilot until roughly 3 weeks ago (I went all in on Claude, to try it out properly), and that's when I started to see a lot of spam on my work account. Coincidence? Yes. Correlation? Yes. Causation? No. And I personally don't care because I assume my work email account is somewhere to be harvested, but when I then see such a but report, it kind of rang a bell like WTF. I am as careful as possible about the requests I send, but I cannot remove the UA or know everything the harness is doing behind the scenes.

This type of bugs kind of kills the trust in the tooling. On the other hand, we're being told to use more and more such black boxes.

[–] weird-eye-issue 2 days ago

I highly doubt this is connected

Usually this is from LinkedIn, GitHub, etc scraping... There are databases where they just guess and verify emails too

[–] gerdesj 2 days ago

OP literally described a timescale for (not spam) to (spam) and you described a few possible options (basically a knee jerk reaction, with no evidence).

The medical world uses the terms indications and contraindications. I think we in IT could do with a similar process/procedure.

[–] ruszki 2 days ago

From somebody who helped fixing bugs by contacting customers directly: the first thing you need to throw out from their story is correlation. Most of the time, it's just a coincidence.

For example, my only used by Claude email address doesn't get any spam at all.

[–] weird-eye-issue 2 days ago

I'm sorry that I'm disputing their totally scientific "timescale". Btw did you mean timeline?

It can take a while for spammers to get your address on their list. Generally the amount of spam over time only goes up. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean there is a causation. Anyone with an email address, including on a custom work domain, has experienced this and Claude wasn't responsible for all email spam lol

[–] jntun 1 day ago

Why are you being intentionally rude? Timescale is completely the right word and it is very telling that you didn't even bother to look up the definition, and in fact suggested a word that is more incorrect! I have a custom domain that is registered with very few select services and receive practically no spam. Are you trying to say that Anthropic should not be concerned with making their users' experience worse/better? Or that is simply our fault for being concerned about spam in our email inboxes?

[–] soraminazuki 1 day ago

Because a large chunk of this community sees anything that puts LLMs in a negative light as an attack on them.

[–] weird-eye-issue 1 day ago

I could care less about that but bringing up completely irrelevant things to blame it for is a bit annoying. At least stick to factual things.

Sites aren't scraping their logs for email address in request headers and selling that to spammers. Getting emails to spam is already easy.

I have email addresses I literally don't use to sign up for anything and they still get spam because you can easily guess the address based on first name on LinkedIn plus the company domain. Spam has been a thing since email was invented.

[–] soraminazuki 1 day ago

Please tell that to the LLM zealots. Because denial of documented facts is called pushing a narrative, not "sticking to facts."

There are numerous confirmed instances of websites asking to put personal information in the user agent string. And people here are downplaying, downvoting, or even denying that this issue exists. I am sick and tired of the relentless grifting that's overtaking the software industry.

[–] weird-eye-issue 1 day ago

You are just putting words in my mouth. I agree Anthropic should not be putting the email addressing in prompts. But I'm simply disagreeing with the causation implied about how it is suddenly causing a bunch of spam.

I am a heavy user and I checked my logs and never once did it include my email in any sort of web requests. The chance that it actually included that person's email and then that led to them getting spammed is just incredibly low.

[–] paulddraper 2 days ago

Yeah. This information is insanely easy to get.

98% I look at a LinkedIn profile, my $SALES_LEAD Chrome extension shows me their email + phone.

(To be clear, not from LinkedIn, but given their name/city/company.)

[–] Foobar8568 2 days ago

Don't forget amazon.

[–] cryptoegorophy 2 days ago

You don’t use Hide My Email feature?

[–] mhzsh 2 days ago

I haven't witnessed the same, but I already get plenty of spam at my work email. Jokes on them though, because my own company spams me more.

[–] eastbound 2 days ago

Did you try to mark it as spam? Gmail might be able to filter internal emails too.