Originally Posted by pinniped
I have hundreds of spams emails in Google, and I've never given it to anybody! All follow this basic premise: spammers are randomly trying every email variant they can think of. Perhaps because I got a Google account early enough to get an actual word (no, it's not "pinniped") I get more hits.
To Google's credit: my inbox is totally clean. My Spam box has all of the messages. A brief perusal of the spam makes me think it was truly random: not a result of Google spying on any of my actual email traffic.
Or, on the social engineering front, some spammer paid a low-level Google employee (hired post-IPO
) a couple thousand bucks for the directory?