Oh dear is this still winding people up? It is SPAM FLOODING and the addresses are just bot generated.
These messages are being received all over the net and are not restricted to users here. I have seen this and other spam flooding to plenty of addresses. I know of a company system that is purley for internal use but the domains there are receiving this garbage to the catchall address.
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That may well be, but, once again, we're not talking about random, Dictionary-attack style email addresses. We're talking about specific email addresses created for use for specific services we provide them to. For example, if I give my email address to avast, I give them THIS_EMAIL_COMES_FROM_AVAST@mydomain.com. If I give it to Best Buy, I give them BEST_BUY_SENT_ME@mydomain.com (or something along those lines).
For those SPECIFIC email addresses to be used as spamming address, a random, dictionary, or even educated-guess style email-address generating bot is VERY unlikely to come up with them, especially if the only time I get a given spam is to an address I specifically supplied to a service or forum, but I don't get those spams to any catchall on my domain.
I assure you that if an email makes it to THIS_EMAIL_COMES_FROM_AVAST@mydomain.com, then that same email will make it to ABCDEFG@mydomain.com, because by the time it reaches the step in email processing on my ISP's servers, it's already passed their spam filters and made it to my procmail filter.
So... are you claiming that the above sorts of email addresses are just randomly generated, or did you mean to say that these bots are using code injection, etc. to extract valid email addresses provided to the forums, for example, as has been suggested?
- Tim