The simplest answer is they are voluntarily being scum and selling user data to make a quick buck. It’s almost universally true.

▲

JimDabell 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> It’s almost universally true.

It’s not. I give a unique email address to every service I register with, which means I can see who is leaking my email address. Very few of them leak my email address at all, and those that do tend to do so involuntarily through data breaches.

The other main factors in spam are the sleazeballs at Apollo, ZoomInfo, et al., services that use my email address internally for more than I consented (if I use my email address to register for a service, this does not permit that service to add me to their product mailing list), and the spammers who guess email addresses based on LinkedIn info (e.g. name + company domain).

The number of services who appear to take an email address I have given them and sell it appear to be extremely rare.

	▲	alt227 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you dont mind, What kind of unique email address do you use and how do you manage all the aliases?
	▲	jen20 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I do the same, and seem to have a much higher hit rate (or a much lower acceptable baseline!)

▲

gruez 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>and selling user data to make a quick buck

Are there actually companies that will pay you $$$ for a list of emails?

▲

jen20 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not exactly, but plenty will just sell everything to data brokers.

	▲	gruez 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>but plenty will just sell everything to data brokers. Again, "sell" implies that there's some company where they'll accept data from anyone and pay them for it, which so far as I can tell doesn't exist. That's not to say there's no selling going on. The fact that data brokers exist means they do, but that doesn't mean every business is in a position to "sell" data.

▲

renewiltord 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's worth nothing. This is an online myth that marks out the user the way the sentence "Expert in JAVA, AWS, GCP, Oracle, and GIT" on a resume marks out the candidate.

	▲	alt227 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My boss has paid many people for lists of email addresses in the past. Im pretty sure he is not a mythical being!