Spam!

[planneroftowns]

I just wanted to post on here to voice my dissatisfaction with Digital Photography School.

I am registered with the weekly email newsletter and generally find the site very interesting and informative. As with other websites I sign up to, I always use a unique email address, i.e. somethingunique123@mydomain.com. My mail server is set up with 'catch all' capabilties to filter emails in this way. I keep a log of addresses and can filter/reduce spam accordingly.

Recently I have received several spam email messages using this unique email address. This (40 character) email address is not published or visible anywhere else on the internet, and so could not have been 'harvested'.

Either:
(a) My email address has been sold/passed on by DPS to spammers.
(b) DPS has been hacked and email addresses leaked.
(c) Spammers happened to have randomly guessed my unique email address used.

I can't believe it's (c), so it must be (a) or (b). I shall be adding this email address to my spam filters.

[Izzy]

Sometimes it is what you can not believe. I have received spam from all sorts of places from my never used anywhere email addy. Your is supposed to be special?

[OsmosisStudios]

What's spam? I haven't gotten "legitimate" spam in my inbox in years.

[mad editor]

Neither have I received any spam in a really long time.

[mosgood]

I get a spam message or 2 sometimes, but it's pretty rare. I doubt DPS is behind it though.

[Krusty79]

I haven't received any extra helpings of spam after joining DPS.

[dakwegmo]

How unique is that somethingunique? If it's not very unique, then it wouldn't take much for a spam bot to get lucky and guess that as a valid email address and once it has a response from a server that an email address is valid it will start sharing that with other spammers as a known valid email address. I've had email addresses that were created and never given to anyone that eventually started receiving spam.

[StillFocus]

I've received spam on an email address that had only existed for seconds. I literally created the address, logged in, and already had someone wanting to sell me something and someone else telling me I'd inherited an African fortune.

[DanielLane]

if your "unique" address did not contain unique characters like _ or . or ^ or the like, it is not unique. Using just letters and numbers will always end up in someone somewhere processing out that email address in an email generator. Even using those odd characters, the address will eventually get figured out. It just takes longer. Don't blame DPS for the problem. Blame the spammers. They have developed very nice algorithms for generating addresses. Heck, I had an email address that was in 5 languages, with random characters and numbers thrown in with additional random letters to boot and was 47 characters long before the @blahblah.com. It still eventually got figured out.