Anyone have an idea what software first started doing this? Or have any idea
why ANYONE would think this was a good idea?
The weird part is that I’m seeing machine generated email where I *know* they
have my full name and they could be using that to synthesize the email but they
don’t. Or, conversely, they could simply not put any full name field in at all
and just use the raw email address…
It’s like someone made the conscious decision to choose the worst of both
worlds…
> On Jul 13, 2017, at 11:49 AM, Philip Prindeville
> wrote:
>
> I’m getting more and more email as:
>
> To: “joeb...@example.com”
>
> anyone know why there’s an increase in this? Did Exchange recently get
> broken so that it’s not populating the Addressbook properly?
>
> I noticed that even legitimate promotional mailers (like 1800petmeds.com) are
> doing this… Even though when you sign up, you give them your full name.
>
> It used to be a reliable trigger for spam (because a lot of harvesters ONLY
> deal in email addresses and don’t bother collecting the fullnames, since they
> mechanically scrape websites, without knowing how to parse anything but email
> addresses themselves—and sometimes not even those correctly, since I’ll see
> Spam addresses to Message-Id: values, References: values, etc.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Philip
>
