Which email addresses receive spam?

One of the advantages of owning a domain name is the ability to create a limitless number of email aliases. I use this to allocate each company that requests an email address a unique one, which makes it a lot easier to spot phishing emails, and track whether a company has used it according to my expectations. A recent browse through my spam email folder showed some egregiously bad spam (obvious frauds, scams, etc) being sent to aliases assigned to companies.

  • Vision Express
  • Tumblr (the micro-blogging platform)
  • JET Photographic, Cambridge
  • Adobe — suffered a well publicised data theft
  • LinkedIn — likely someone with whom I am connected since they would then see this email and could import it into their personal address book
  • Dropbox — dropbox includes this email address when I share files and links with others via its service so again the leakage is probably from a third party

Another surprising result of my browse is that the email address I publish on this website does not get very much automated spam, although it does get the occasional offer of “sponsored posts”.