Which pretty much has to mean the site's been harvested for e-mail addresses.

Not at all. That's the kind of email address that can easily be extracted by "Rumplestiltskin" attacks.

Not that it really matters. I just wanted to write "Rumplestiltskin".

"Rumplestiltskin" attacks

What are these?

I get tons of mail to madeupnames at my domain name but I only accept items with valid addresses. It is somewhat inconvenient for customers who misspell our names, but keeping up with dumping the stuff was burdensome after a couple years. I now only get about a dozen offers a day for larger penii and mortgages.

"Rumplestiltskin" attacks

What are these?

They are email address harvesting attacks where a spammer pretends to send email to a bunch of made-up email addresses on a mail server. The server responds differently if the email address actually exists on the server or not. The spammer keeps all the addresses that the server claims exist.

Some recent mail servers have defenses against this kind of attack, but many don't. So even if you've never posted your email address anywhere, or given it to anyone, it can still end up with the spammers.

So even if you've never posted your email address anywhere, or given it to anyone, it can still end up with the spammers.

WOW. That's really, really depressing.

Not so much unique names, but general names like sales or info or admin get a ton of junk. Although back when I let the stuff through I would get stuff for LauraA LauraB LauraC and so forth.

I get tons of spam on my .edu account. You'd figure a university could screen the damn things, no? I have given it up as my spam account, and now it's the address I hand out to strangers.

I get asian porn spam at the university account for ESL.

I can see admin might get Rumplestilkskin, but admins too? I'd have figured that rarer.

Either way, can't hurt to be safe.

Yahoo mail screens for viruses, right? I've seen an upsurge in spam since I put my email in my website.