Let's consider a few things: 1) Just because it hasn't happened to you, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I have quite a few examples of companies selling o

Let's consider a few things: 1) Just because it hasn't happened to you, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I have quite a few examples of companies selling or otherwise sharing, whether intentionally or through compromise, my email addresses. 2) If someone (some company) is going to sell email addresses, it's not unreasonable to imagine that they'd want to remove any addresses that would directly link those addresses to their source, so a quick search to remove any address with the word "adobe" in it when selling Adobe mailing lists would not be unexpected in the least. Years ago I set out to learn more about the "missing sock" problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_sock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_sock). I bought a dozen pair of brand new socks and I ironed on labels identifying each and every sock. Guess what? The labeled socks never went missing. The act of labeling the socks dramatically affected the experiment. Perhaps using companies' names in our email addresses is affecting our results.