What's going on with my email?

October 19, 2006 10:19 AM

Has a company given out my email address, or am I at fault?

I use a catch-all email address on my domain, and customize addresses anytime I enter it in forms. For instance, amazon has [e-mail], metafilter has [e-mail], etc.

Just a *few* times have I noticed SPAM coming to emails that I've given out. United Airlines is a known offender (I'm not the only one, according to Google), but junk mail to addresses given to two pretty small companies have also appeared in the last year or so, one in just the last month.

Both companies responded immediately, but hadn't had anyone else report this, and can't figure out where the leak was.

My question is: I assumed that *they* inadvertently compromised my address, but is it possible that there's fault on my end? Something on my system or servers? What are the possibilities?

If it's on their end, it's easy for me to deal with, as I can just filter that incoming email to Junk. If not, what should I do?

posted by squishy to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Spammers do occasionally spam random words at random domains, so it is possible that a spammer sent mail to one of your addresses by chance.
posted by Mwongozi at 10:22 AM on October 19, 2006

I used to do the same thing and have received spam to one of my "made-up" addresses. I think spammers are wise to this practice and will make up recipient addresses like "[e-mail]" or "[e-mail]".

So I switched to a new system where all made-up emails begin with a certain prefix followed by the company name (e.g. "[e-mail]"). Since I started this I haven't received any spam to any of these prefixed emails.
posted by justkevin at 10:25 AM on October 19, 2006

United is the only one that's ever done this for me (and they don't seem to care when I complain), but I prepend an "atomly-" to the address I give out, so the chances of me getting them at random might be lowered. If these are words that might be randomly tried by spam bots, I could see that happening.

If, on the other hand, the addresses are things like [e-mail], then I have a hard time believing it's random or that you'd accidentally give it out. Chances are they gave out the address or it got taken from them (hacking, a worm, etc).

I'd add the address to your killfile, make some new ones and update your info with the companies. If it happens again, then you know the definite source of the problem.
posted by atomly at 10:29 AM on October 19, 2006

In the early days of email spam, when the big thing was selling CD-ROMs with "100 million email addresses!" (via spam, of course) the CD makers would simply make up names. I stopped counting at 4,000 made up names at a domain I own. A lot of those fake addresses are still floating around.
posted by maxwelton at 11:08 AM on October 19, 2006

Response by poster: I'd be really surprised if it were random. Both of the small companies are ones that I've either bought software from, or *know* that I'm on their "updates" mailing list.

atomly: Yeah, United responded to my complaint with a "Change your email address" suggestion. Nice, eh?
posted by squishy at 2:08 PM on October 19, 2006

"If, on the other hand, the addresses are things like [e-mail], then I have a hard time believing it's random or that you'd accidentally give it out."

Oh, it's very very believable. I see it all the time in my error logs. I do not make up addresses like "[e-mail]" and stuff, but I constantly see attempts to mail that address. I've seen a huge list of $company_name@$domain.tld types of emails being rejected. Literally thousands of emails per day for various domains that I host.
posted by drstein at 7:43 PM on October 19, 2006