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I have used different email addresses for ever recipient/registration for 20 years. There have been very few incidents. More than 15 years ago the addresses I
by usr1106 5y ago
I have used different email addresses for ever recipient/registration for 20 years. There have been very few incidents.
More than 15 years ago the addresses I had used for Financial Times and Finnair started to get Viagra etc spam. At least one of them was after a big leak at an online marketing firm that made headlines. I closed the addresses so I have no idea whether the flood has ever stopped.
Maybe 10 years ago I booked a cruise to Saint Petersburg using a coupon from Groupon. After that I started to get spam in Russian. I don't read Russian but online gambling was obviously a topic. I contacted Groupon and asked about their sharing. Talked to their head of don't remember and he claimed it's simple: They don't share the address with anyone. It was obviously not true befause I never had any contact with Russia before or after and the timing was very evident. I closed the address.
Another address is in the Linux source / LKML. It gets Nigeria letters all the time, but with low frequency. Less than 1 a week on average. Maybe 1 or 2 in German and French over the years.
Those are the biggest cases. Maybe some other odd one over 20 years. It's worse with completely stupid tech marketing on my work address (which has been the same for 4 years).
- usr1106 5y agoThere is one more: I have one address shared with about 100 private users in Germany. Many of them not technical at all. It gets German phishing attempts all the time, maybe 1-2 per month. I assume a user was infected by malware. Edit: And there has always been spam to my gmail address. I have shared/stored my gmail address in extremely few locations just for forwarding and it's of form first.last@gmail.com. There are only 3-5 people on the planet with the same name. The spam comes without dot so I guess it's not from a list of email addresses, but generated from a list of names. My name has been on the Internet e.g. in Usenet and in scientific papers many times long before gmail existed. Volume is not too bad, a couple of them every month. It was worse years ago.