Eric writes: > Have you never created e-mail addresses without > ever making them public, and nevertheless note > that you get SPAM anyway? Not that I can recall. > I did. I created more than one e-mail address > without ever making them public, and though I > note some of them receive SPAM! Were the addresses along the lines of "postmaster," "info," or "webmaster," by chance? > How do the spammers find such addresses? Do > they automatically try all possible combinations > of firstname_lastname@some-well-known-domains.com? They must either harvest them or guess them. For non-obvious e-mail addresses that are never published, they cannot practically do either of these, and so the addresses will not be spammed. Most people I know who do not post to USENET or put their addresses on Web sites or post to mailing lists receive very little spam, whereas I receive several hundred spams a day on the addresses that I've publicly released (but none on other addresses).