The absolute worst offender are political activists: (In the US)
I attended my town's meeting for a political party in 2016. I put my name and email on the list with an email address that I made up on the spot. It continues to get HAMMERED by every up-and-coming politician in the state who's trying to make a name for themselves.
A few years ago I attended Senator Ed Markey's roadshow for the Green New Deal. I again used a unique email address. Someone on the staff sent the address a LinkedIn invite promoting their puppet show business.
I interviewed with Microsoft in the fall of 2004 and used a unique email address on the application. It started getting SPAM. I think I blocked it in my email provider.
Looking in my SPAM folder, most of the spam is going to my gmail account, and most of it is recruiter spam. (There are a lot of recruiters who just SPAM, and I report them.) But: I have 2 emails in German to an email address I used with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View probably sometime between 2005-2007.
Speaking of resume spam: Next time I publish a resume I'm going to do "jobboard_year@...". I'm getting hammered with resume spam, a lot of it from recruiters who either haven't read my resume, have poor comprehension, or hit send with glaring errors.
Years ago I blocked a bunch of addresses in my email provider that I never used. (I'm not going to look them up now.) They were very random, but somehow they just kept getting emails. I have no idea why.
And finally: In 2003 I put out a resume with "resume@..." That got hammered with SPAM. A repeat offender was someone trying to sell a car detailing franchise. I had to block that address.
In 2003 someone tried to get me to join Quickstar, a new initiative from Amway. (It's now been merged into Amway.)
I gave them "quickstar@..."
A few months later I got a cease-and-desist to the email address, and the moron who tried to get me involved called me up and started threatening me.
I had to explain to their lawyer what a catch-all is. Fortunately, he was a very reasonable person who very quickly realized that his company made a HUUUUUGE mistake.
Never had a lawsuit, but yeah, it's interesting to see who it trips up. I'm pretty sure I lost out on a job opportunity with a high profile company because the email I used was (company)@(my domain), and I got asked by an insurance agent to confirm I wasn't an employee of their company when I had (their company)@(my domain), which he indicated was because of the email address. Go figure.
> The absolute worst offender are political activists: (In the US)
The alias I used for one of the big donation platforms has apparently been given to every single person running for any political office in the state along with many out of state. It gets dozens of emails a day, most of which automatically end up in spam.
Same here. I put my email down when I was a democrat. I still get emails from them after unsubscribing many, many times.
The problem with unsubscribing is that distributing your email address isn't illegal, so they put you on a new list with a different name and - you didn't exactly unsubscribe from THAT list did you!
I actually had good success calling the office of the spammer in question and complaining to the person answering the phone. A young staffer with political ideals tends to pick up the phone and they empathize. They take my email address and seem to do something with it. I did this maybe 4 times over a span of a year and the chain reaction stopped.
I think this is a two-party problem? Due to the polarity, people (as a mob) are 'forced' to back their party regardless of how scummy the affiliated actors act. Your regret means nothing because you probably still won't vote for another party and they already have as much of your money as you are willing to give. They can continue to harvest funds with these dark patterns with no cost - and they will find some whales who strongly respond to the marketing no matter the spam.
The Trump campaign has had some remarkable temerity in this field:
>GROSS: So let me stop you. So in order to not make monthly donations, you had to notice that there was a pre-checked box saying you were making monthly donations. And you had to uncheck that box. You had to take action (laughter) if you didn't want to make monthly donations?
>GOLDMACHER: Exactly. That's what they did earlier in the campaign. And then they made the box more complicated. They added a second box to take out a bonus donation a few days later. And they added all kinds of extraneous text in each of these boxes. And so by the end of the race, the disclosure that this box that was pre-checked would withdraw a monthly donation was buried beneath seven lines of other text that had nothing to do with the fact that it was going to take this money out every month, and seven lines of text saying there's going to be a second donation. So if you sign up to give $25, you gave that day, they took out another $25 a few days later. And then it took out $25 every month. And then this is what they did at the end of the race which caused such a spike in refund requests. They didn't take the money out every month, they started taking it out every week. And so while somebody might miss that their donation happened a second time the next month or they take a couple of months on their credit card to miss, you don't usually miss that suddenly, your credit card has four contributions in a single month when you intended to only make one. And so what happened in the reporting that I did was that there was a huge surge of complaints to credit card companies of fraud, saying, this is wrong. I didn't sign up for these kinds of donations.
Political spam is incredibly shady in the US, but I don't get the volume you're describing. Maybe at one point I did, though, maybe 10 years back. I do get a good amount from both major parties.
It beggars belief, but sometimes one party will be sending mails carefully tailored to make you think they are from the other party - stealing not just the overall design and color schemes, but even trying to use turns of phrases common to the other party. The mails will link back to a similarly carefully crafted website which never says which party the candidate is from. If you sniff around, you can find their other site which is designed to appeal to their usual voters, which clearly identifies which party they are from. I've seen a half dozen state level politicians pull this in the last 15 years or so. Crazy stuff.
Additionally, I get political spam (and a few other politics adjacent topics) meant for my father (addressed to him by name). This is because AOL sells subscriber lists to spammers, and I still have an AOL address from my teenage years and I'm a techno-packrat who never willingly throws anything away. How do I know they sold their subscriber lists? Because my father had the master account, and my siblings and I all had sub-accounts from the main one. Obviously, in the AOL records which got sold his name was on all the email addresses as the account owner. But of course, AOL has been a shady company for decades so this is no surprise.
I get a lot of spam from various meetup groups too. One which I can't shake, which I find very amusing, is "Women in Tech" meetups. My IRL name is male, but not that common anymore, and people are tempted to read it as feminine. Try as I might, I cannot convince them that I should not be showing up to "Women in Tech" meetups and unsubscribing doesn't seem to do anything. I have taken to just forwarding those emails to my wife, who actually is a woman in tech, but strangely doesn't get these emails.
I attended my town's meeting for a political party in 2016. I put my name and email on the list with an email address that I made up on the spot. It continues to get HAMMERED by every up-and-coming politician in the state who's trying to make a name for themselves.
A few years ago I attended Senator Ed Markey's roadshow for the Green New Deal. I again used a unique email address. Someone on the staff sent the address a LinkedIn invite promoting their puppet show business.
I interviewed with Microsoft in the fall of 2004 and used a unique email address on the application. It started getting SPAM. I think I blocked it in my email provider.
Looking in my SPAM folder, most of the spam is going to my gmail account, and most of it is recruiter spam. (There are a lot of recruiters who just SPAM, and I report them.) But: I have 2 emails in German to an email address I used with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View probably sometime between 2005-2007.
Speaking of resume spam: Next time I publish a resume I'm going to do "jobboard_year@...". I'm getting hammered with resume spam, a lot of it from recruiters who either haven't read my resume, have poor comprehension, or hit send with glaring errors.
Years ago I blocked a bunch of addresses in my email provider that I never used. (I'm not going to look them up now.) They were very random, but somehow they just kept getting emails. I have no idea why.
And finally: In 2003 I put out a resume with "resume@..." That got hammered with SPAM. A repeat offender was someone trying to sell a car detailing franchise. I had to block that address.