After forwarding the usual clutch of spam labelled mail to Action fraud I’m wondering how it is the buggers get hold of email addresses? I don’t sign up for any dodgy services, yet I receive them.

I think a lot of them just create thousands and thousands of random email addresses.

I used to get spam addressed to an email address that was similar but not identical to mine, apparently there were thousands of other email addresses in the BCC that you can’t see.

Haven’t seen any like that for a while mind.

Email addresses are ‘public knowledge’. Even if they weren’t, your email address would be harvested when a company gets breached, or when someone with whom you’ve corresponded has their email hacked. Then there’s the automation side of email address generation where algorithms are used to generate huge lists of likely / valid email addresses.

I wondered if it wasn’t a tireless ‘bot randomly generating addresses.