I recently put my old Hotmail account on my phone, which I traditionally only checked a few times a year. I went from 1-2 spam emails every few months to several a day, after going through all the old ones and marking them as spam. How is this possible? I haven’t given this email out in years, and none of my monitoring services have flagged this email recently. It seems spammers somehow know this email is active again.
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In addition to the tracking pixels mentioned by UntangledQubit, another possibility is automatic unsubscribe. I know Gmail helpfully tries to “unsubscribe” you from certain emails when you mark them as junk/unwanted, and this feature can be abused as a way to confirm the email address is active (and obviously spam it more rather than following their wishes). I’m not sure if [outlook.com](https://outlook.com) has similar functionality but your mail client might.
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