Nerd Forum question

[CrazyOne]

Okay, here's the sitch.. (alright, I admit it, I watch Kim Possible on occasion.)

At the company where I am the de facto IT manager, we gave the boss a new email address about 6 months ago (by adding the middle initial to the typical first initial, lastname @yourcompany formula) because she was getting several hundred spam a day.
Now, suspiciously to me, her new address is starting to follow the same pattern. I know she doesn't get on the net and pass her name around, and we keep up to date with security stuff (for the most part), so I'm at a loss to explain why her new address is getting spammed so much. In comparison, none of the other addresses we use get even a fraction of the volume hers does.
One thing to note, around the end of last year there was a rather acrimonious dissolution of the business partnership, and her former partner has shown a pattern of small pettiness. In addition, several of the spams address the boss with a derivative of her name that the former partner would use occasionally, that seemed to irritate the boss.

Can anyone give me a plausible explanation for the superabundance of spam to the new address that doesn't include a former friend just sticking her address in response to a bunch of junk mail ads? I hate to be suspicious like this, but I haven't been able to come up with a more satisfying explanation.

[mcornelio]

sounds like you hit the nail on the head there nutcase

[CrazyOne]

Thanks for your input... and for the term of endearment... somebody cares. (sniff)

[Slomo]

I'm going to state the obvious here but these are the main reasons for getting on SPAM lists (beside answering SPAMs or registering at shady websites):

1.- Being in the address book of an infected/corrupt PC (could be the PC of your best friend)
2.- Participating in mailing lists (receiving/posting) - it is quite easy for spybots to extract email addresses from such lists
3.- Posting on forums (most forums require a valid email and a lot of them do not protect it well)
4.- Publishing e-mail on websites (i.e. contact info on company website)

If none of these apply to her then maybe your line of thought is correct. I would personnaly bet on number 1.

Hope this helps.

[CrazyOne]

Hmm... our company website is mostly dead, but I checked it... there's an address there that never gets a hit.
Forums... I doubt she goes there.
Mailing lists for healthcare is a small possibility... but again, others here are on similar lists, and no one else gets near the volume.
I reinstalled Norton Internet security on her computer recently, maybe I need to run a few other spyware checks to be on the safe side.

Thanks.

[ashbeeigh]

That happened to me when I got to school as a freshman at my university. I had no idea how they got my address (pre facebook, my space, etc) and I didn't even konw it until I registered)/ There was no way to explain it. I went and bitched to the "Help Desk" who were as clueless as I was. All I could do was unsubscribe to all e-mails I was getting. It also sounded like her, I was one of the few people that was getting a lot of e-mails (200 + a day). By law, all those types of e-mails she is getting have to have an unsubscribe link, which she should probably (probably, but if there aren't then I wouldn't know what to do) click and unsubscribe. Most likely it's one large company that has a large grouping of mass lists and once you find that one they'll stop. That's how it stopped for me.