Earthlink sells e-mail addresses?

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On Sunday I set up a temporary additional e-mail address with my Earthlink account. Within hours I was receiving spam on that account. How the hell can that happen unless Earthlink either sells their e-mail addresses, or does not properly protect their customer’s e-mail addresses? Has anyone else had this happen? Is it just a coincidence? The address I made up is pretty random — it is not like “Joe@” or anything…

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If you check the Earthlink TOS I’d guess they say they don’t sell your information. There may be something about sharing with partners that you can opt out of. Is your Earthlink account your own domain name such as those that are part of your signature? Are you running any mail server software?

Joe

--Joe

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This new e-mail is not used anywhere. From the spam I’m getting, I would be a bit horrified if Earthlink is somehow partners with these organizations. No, the Earthlink account is not associated with my domain name (I set up a @earthlink account). It is just waaaaaaayyyy too weird that a brand new made up e-mail address starts getting spam hours later.

I will be deleting this account anyway (it was just a temporary thing to test stuff on my end) but still odd…

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It could be a deleted username of a former Earthlink user. Old addresses can linger for decades in spammers’ databases, since it costs more to clean up the list than to send e-mails to invalid addresses.

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaah — that makes sense! I guess my random/generic address wasn’t random enough. I’ll have to keep this in mind for the future. Thanks; good idea…

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