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Can spammers discover valid email addresses?
Is it possible to discover valid email addresses from a domain more efficiently than just trying to send mail to random addresses, i.e. brute forcing?
Viewed from another perspective: If an email address you've only used in one service starts to receive spam, how strong evidence does this constitute that the service has leaked (sold even) the address to spammers?
1 answer
If the local part isn't obvious,[1] I'd say the likelihood is high that the service shared or sold its list or possibly even was hacked.
If you use the name of the service in the local part ([email protected]), the spammer could infer that other services in the local part could also work, and so try to disguise its origin. But why do that? They're usually operating on volume, and they might guess a service that you don't use.
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admin,postmaster,abuse,staff,info, … ↩︎
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