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Michael Gray

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Personal mail addresses not used in years show up on To: line of email from unknown vendor.

I own a small business. My wife, who is also an owner received an email from a company we never contacted. The "To:" line included my wife's business "OurDomain.com" email address and two of my ancient personal email accounts, 1 mindspring.com and 1 AOL.com, not used in over 10 years. How did this vendor get those old personal email addresses and associate them with our business address?
Email Servers* email addresses

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Michael Gray
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Dave Baldwin
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There are people and organizations that collect and keep all the email addresses that they can.  It seems that nothing ever disappears from the internet.  If it was ever 'public' knowledge, somebody has it.
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Michael Gray

ASKER

Makes sense.

It's bizarre that this is the first time i've seen any reference to those addresses in at least 10 years. Why now?
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Dave Baldwin
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Avatar of Michael Gray
Michael Gray

ASKER

Yea, they're scraping the bottom of the email address barrel.

thank you
Email Servers
Email Servers

Within Internet message handling services (MHS), a message transfer agent or mail transfer agent (MTA) or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using a client–server application architecture. A MTA implements both the client (sending) and server (receiving) portions of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host may also refer to a computer performing the MTA function. The Domain Name System (DNS) associates a mail server to a domain with mail exchanger (MX) resource records containing the domain name of a host providing MTA services.

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