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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There’s a pretty basic extension that’s free called mailtrack. It just embeds software into each email you send to see if a person has received, and/or opened an email. I use it for business emails when I’m expecting a response. I’m sure there’s a more complex version of this that can track an entire email account to some degree
The likely answer to your question is that you’re being targeted through 3rd party services that allow re-marketing based on your profile.
Let me give you an example.
10 years ago you registered at siteX with your hotmail email address.
7 years ago, you got a new email address. You went to siteX and told them your new email address.
Your new email, and your old email, are now both associated with the same person.
You now go to siteY, today, and sign-up with your new email address.
Next you go to siteZ, but siteY set a tracker that is now associated with you. It doesn’t include your name, or email address – it just knows that the person who visited siteY and siteZ are the same person.
The owner of siteZ sends this identifier to a 3rd party company who says “yes, we know who that person is – this is their email address!”.
Now since your email address is both a hotmail address from years ago, and a new email address – and they’re both associated with you – any site you visit that triggers this automation can either give the website your new, or your old email address.
This is how it happens. I know because this is the type of tech I’ve developed, and use, on a daily basis.
Now, in terms of what others are saying about tracking pixels – yes, those exist. That’s not how spammers know an email is active though as many email service providers are running those trackers through the equivalent of a VPN to anonymize the data. They’re likely using link clicks, which yes, can include a remove link.
Alongside all the correct technical reasons in other comments, I just wanted to say that as a daily Hotmail user for years, I have also recently seen a massive influx of spam. It’s entirely possible that Microsoft have weakened their filtering, or someone has found and shared a workaround.
> I recently put my old Hotmail account on my phone
Potentially you have an app on your phone that is collecting your contacts and account information and selling it to marketers
Dead emails would have a bounce back message from the domain.
They also don’t much care if the email is ‘active’ these things are run by bots and defending out billions of emails blindly.
Beware of unsubscribing from spam emails also. I tell my customers that only do so from reputable companies. (The unsubscription process verifies that your email is alive…)
They don’t.
They’re sending out thousands of emails to different addresses from lists they have purchased. They are only interested in those that respond. It doesn’t matter to them if a message never gets delivered to a particular address.
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