so why is it that I get almost no spam to my earthlink account and I don't see continuing, loud, unhappy noises like this from earthlink users? They're not AS big as AOL, but they're big enough that the scaling issues simply aren't that important.
Two reasons.
1) Luck coupled with scale. I *do* get spam at my Earthlink account, but not nearly as much...
2) AOL has a concept of being visible online in the service. Much AOL harvesting is done by collecting screenames from chat rooms.
