<p>I have my customary AOL account that I use all the time. I get some spam – most of which is directed to my spam folder – and life is good.</p>
<p>I also have an AOL account that I set up specifically because the screen name is closer to my name than the usual one and I wanted to “reserve” that screen name. I never send mail from that account and never use that screen name to sign up for anything. I check the account maybe every six or eight weeks and am always surprised at the amount of junk that gets sent there. Today there were 66 messages in my in-box and 21 more in my spam folder. I would say half of the messages were from a sender called “Lose Weight with Jillian Michaels!”</p>
<p>Does someone actually have my screen name, or do spammers just run a random assortment of letters and numbers and eventually they get a hit?? (Like monkeys typing and eventually writing Shakespeare.)</p>
<p>Good question. AOL used to have a searchable database of usernames. If they no longer allow that type of access due to privacy concerns, I know that when you choose a new username they tell you if that name is available or not. How hard would it be for a programmer (hacker) to write a program that tried to create a username, and if told that name is not available, simply adds it to the mailing list?</p>
<p>I left AOL in the early 90’s for that very reason - to this day I am convinced that it’s an inside job, meaning, someone is selling AOL addresses. The second option, randomly generated addresses based on peoples’ names, is possible but not as likely. In our case I created a few accounts that were a reasonable permutation of my name (ethnic, kind of distinctive) and they were all spammed within hours. Added some digits in the middle and that helped some, but they too were eventually spammed. These were accounts that were canon fodder, never used, and **not **listed in the AOL directory. </p>
<p>After a series of emails with AOL Tech Support I realized they did not care to address the issue and dropped AOL.</p>
<p>I have an aol account and I have recently started receiving a lot of spam. This seems to occur periodically. I would go to another service, but it was such a pain last time I changed my email address…</p>
<p>In our case, the ethnic name in question is not exactly a common one to begin with, and its length… figure 15+ characters, it’s a staggering number of combinations. I could see them doing smith12, smith13, or patel01, patel02, etc, but KingTutankhamun01, KingTutankhamun02, etc… The spam arrived about a day after an account was created, so it’s not likely they could do it by trial-and-error. </p>
<p>We theorized that either AOL had some backdoor into the user directory such that even ‘unlisted’ user names showed up, or, more likely, the spammers had an insider that leaked account info. There have been several well publicized cases of that happening. </p>
<p>Perhaps even a hybrid model whereas KingTutankhamun would be ‘guessed’ by virtue of his Majesty having an account (and the information leaked), but King1Tutankhamun or KingTut2000BC or some such would throw the alphabet spammer component off.</p>
<p>I spent a bit of time with AOL techs on the issue and also experimented a bit with ID’s and when I realized they were not interested or even able to comprehend the issue (very early spam, not Sanford Wallace type) I gave up and changed ISP’s… I did write the corporate procmail filtering scripts we used for years on our unix mail server… We had very trivial to guess user id’s (letter letter number number number) and were on Usenet for ever… no wonder :)</p>
<p>^^ Usenet, that is it. I used to use an email address on the Uesnet and it was spammed so much that I have to delete it(from ny own domain)…</p>
<p>However, “alphbet spammer” probably is not the reason OP’s id got spammed, as turbo93 had pointed out. I can create a very easy name using my own domain such as <a href="mailto:bob@xxx.net">bob@xxx.net</a> it has not been spammed if I do not use it. In theory, it should be easily found, because xxx.net is in public domain and bob is a common name.</p>
<p>^Use is not necessary. Yes, you would think that a spammer would simply go through a list of common names, but they don’t seem to do this. I have my own domain as well, and I get piles of incoming mail addressed to mail addresses I have never set up, but most are addressed to gibberish. Among the non-gibberish names (hint: if you have your own domain, do not use these) are:</p>
<p>webmaster
info
bookings
office
contact
sales
ciao
jesus
respectable
manager
discount
support
customerservice
prozac</p>
<p>For the AOL situation, it is very possible that an internal computer got a virus, which was then able to obtain address info. I’ve had two New York Times addresses get spam in this way (I’ve never used them for anything else at all.)</p>
<p>I have a many years-old AOL email address that is mostly used for relatives and a few businesses; started a second address a few years ago that I use for everything else. The old address got an occasional spam every few weeks. Then a few months ago my mom signed me up (without my knowledge) for a lifetime membership in Hadassah and gave them my old AOL email. Now I’m not saying it’s Hadassah’s fault, but my spam jumped shortly thereafter. It’s still no more than one or two dozen spams a week so not too bad.</p>