Since I have Comcast’s cable internet service, I also have an e-mail address at comcast.net that I got with it. I don’t actually use it for anything, because I don’t want to have my e-mail address be tied to something like my Internet service that can change so easily. If I switch to FIOS tomorrow, I’d have to give everyone a new Verizon e-mail address. I’ve changed e-mail addresses enough times at this point (which is one of the reasons I wanted my own domain name, but that’s a separate issue). Sorry, that was a lot of words to say “I don’t use my Comcast e-mail address.”
But now for some reason I’m getting a fair amount of spam at that unused address. It came on pretty suddenly within the past week, and now I’m getting around one or two messages a day. Half stock spam, half mortgage spam.
The only thing this address has been used for is to activate the (limited) Giganews newsgroup service you get with Comcast. That’s it. And since the limited communication with Giganews has always been via Comcast, that should mean that Comcast is the only one that has my comcast.net e-mail address. So how did the spammers get it?
I don’t think it’s a very guessable address. Comcast has enough users and former users that I had to add some random numbers to the username I wanted before I found one that hadn’t been used before. So for spammers to be spamming me would tend to mean that e-mail address and account names got leaked from Comcast, wouldn’t it?
That doesn’t inspire confidence. Now, I guess it’s possible that the spammers are getting very aggressive with guessing possible usernames, but that doesn’t really seem like the most likely explanation.