This was years ago, but I once contacted Barracuda to inquire about buying one of their Spam Firewalls. I used "myname-barracuda@mydomain". Before I even got

This was years ago, but I once contacted Barracuda to inquire about buying one of their Spam Firewalls. I used "myname-barracuda@mydomain". Before I even got a response from the salesperson, I got a spam e-mail to that address. Then I got a response from the salesperson. I asked if he knew that I had started getting spam to the e-mail address that only they had, and he said there was no way that was possible. I figured that his machine had some malware on it, and that harvested my address and sent it to the spammers. But the cynic in me wondered if they wanted to make money from selling the spammers my e-mail address AND from selling me a spam firewall.