I get lots of spam mail, just like we all do. I never know where the spammers get my email name from because my I have used my email addresses to send emails so many times they are part of the public blogosphere.
But a couple of days ago I came across an interesting site, and the owner of the site had some invitations to a private beta of another site. So I asked for an invitation and left my email address.
Except that I used an alias. I have an email account that allows me to invent a number of aliases. And I thought this was a good time to use an alias specially made for the purpose, rather than put my address in the comment box. And that is the only time I have written that email address.
Today I get a notification at that email address, of a breach of my paypal aacount. And it’s in French, and it begins:
Nous avons recemment examine votre compte et nous avons besoin de plus d’informations sur votre entreprise pour nous permettre de fournir un service ininterrompu. Jusqu a ce que nous pouvons recueillir cette information, l’acces a votre compte de caractйristiques sensibles sera limite… and it invites me to visit the Centre et de la resolutions to clear up the misunderstanding.
So I look in the long headers and it comes from paypa@… Whoops, I think they missed a letter ‘l’
So I could care less, but it’s interesting to note that someone has gone to the trouble of reading the comments on a blog to harvest emails to spam me with a fraudulent email that is trying to steal from me.