So I got one of those reclaimed Yahoo mail accounts under my name

[G+_Dan Phillips]

So I got one of those reclaimed Yahoo mail accounts under my name. In the span of one week I have 49 spam messages. I've never posted the email online or used it to send messages since I've owned it. 

[G+_Dan Phillips]

Well I did try a password reset at Amazon. Of course I wouldn't actually do it, just wanted to see if it was an option. Amazon didn't have a record of the account so either it never existed or it was purged. 

[G+_Dan Phillips]

Corey Quilliam From 1998 to 2008 I worked in the web and email hosting business. What Spammers do is called Directory Harvest Attack. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_harvest_attack

 

Any email provider that sold customer's addresses would not be in business for very long. However there have been cases were rouge employees did collect tons of emails and sold them to the highest bidder. 

 

Spam is huge pain the butt as it leads to wasted bandwidth and extra maintenance on your servers network. 

[G+_Dan Phillips]

I'm not sure what kind of deal Rogers has with Yahoo and I have not used them for Internet in years but I'm positive the are not turning over addresses for spam.

 

Rogers, (and Bell, Shaw, Cogeco, etc) are huge targets so using the attack I mentioned above, Spammers are more likely to successfully deliver message to their users. 

 

From a money standpoint, it doesn't make sense for a large corporation to sell your info to a spammer. However, some user agreements state that your info may be used or shared to 3rd parties for marketing purposes. Now if those 3rd parties choose to sell your name, well there you go. However once this is discovered the ties to that company are usually severed.