Since I primarily use gmail, you're correct I don't.
That doesn't change the fact that I've not received any spam as a result of being a member of this forum.
Your not having full visibility into your email server configuration and logs calls that "fact" into question. Furthermore, have you always given the avast forum a unique email address that you've used no where else?
I think this is a very valid question.
For example, my situation is that, while I don't run my own email server, my ISP allows me to set the level of ferocity of their spam filtering software (I haven't checked if they let me view their logs of attempted spams that were completely filtered out, blacklisted, etc.).
My ISP also puts emails it is not 100% sure are spam into a 'graymail' box, so that I can examine them. In this case, the filters didn't catch it.
Also, once mail gets past the spam and graymail filters, I have a large number of procmail filters that are applied, sorting emails into about 20 different mailboxes based on various rules - from, to, subject, indirectly-sent (eg. mailing list or BCC), etc. That way, I quickly can find suspect emails, or emails in mailboxes that have nothing to do with the associated email address. Since I tag EVERY email address I give out, pretty much, I find any spams to specific email addresses very quickly.
I think the above set of conditions provides a lot of visibility into what's happening to my email addresses, short of running my own mail server. There are probably quite a few emails I don't ever see that are caught by my ISP's (very good) spam filters, of course.
In any case, though we may not have convinced Bob that our emails have been stolen/sold/harvested/hacked or otherwise gotten by something other means than a dictionary-style hack, I maintain that it is likely that it has. From things folks have said here, it's likely some sort of injection on known insecurities in this forum software, or an inside job by an untrustworthy employee (unless we want to believe that Avast would risk its reputation purposefully, which I do doubt they would).
- Tim