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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One way is just getting email address lists. Your email is valuable for marketing and lists are available across the internet. Some companies protect your contact information, some lose it and it becomes publicly available, and others outright sell it (looking at you, Facebook). Bottom line is when you get added to a spam list, you’re there and it’s commonly shared. Spammers may also send test emails out common or predictable user accounts at major carriers (format user[at]provider.com) and record which accounts do not return an “invalid recipient” error for future spam campaigns, which is another way to forever exist on a list that gets passed around.
Marketing is simultaneously ruining and funding our “free” technology (even old bad tech like USPS).
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