I did some freelancing (of the "setup an ecommerce site on a vps with some customisation and plugins for mom-and-pop shop" variety) in the 90s. No big jobs just

I did some freelancing (of the "setup an ecommerce site on a vps with some customisation and plugins for mom-and-pop shop" variety) in the 90s. No big jobs just lots of small ones to make some beer money. The usual process was install osCommerce, add some extras, zip it all up and manually deploy it to a VPS and transfer the credentials to the owners. The work was mostly found by word of mouth so it wasn't unusual to get emails asking for assistance/to do work out of the blue. Had one such email to change an existing shop up a bit. Probably no more than a few days work. Received their credentials and ssh'd to the host machine to take a look. Scanning the source files of the plugins had me head scratching in a couple of places, decided this was compiled by someone terrible. Scrolled some more and saw the author's details. Oops. So that's how they got my email address.