The vast majority of my spam comes from the bad old days of desktop pc viruses and people using outlook express (say 15+ years ago).
Back then, my college required us to forward our university email to a personal account. That's fine as our personal addresses were hidden and not public.
What was not fine was one day the IT department changed everyone's public email address to their private address. They also changed mailing lists from BCC to CC so that you got to see everyone's email who received the email.
A few hours later after these changes, the spam started rolling in. At first it was a moderate amount of spam, a few messages a day, but it quickly increased. At one point it was up to 200-300 spam messages a day and stayed that way for several years. In any given month my gmail spam count sat between 3,000 to 6,000.
Over the past 10 years, as botnets have been taken down, those numbers have come down an order of magnitude. I still get between 20 - 30 spam messages a day on that account.
Back then, my college required us to forward our university email to a personal account. That's fine as our personal addresses were hidden and not public.
What was not fine was one day the IT department changed everyone's public email address to their private address. They also changed mailing lists from BCC to CC so that you got to see everyone's email who received the email.
A few hours later after these changes, the spam started rolling in. At first it was a moderate amount of spam, a few messages a day, but it quickly increased. At one point it was up to 200-300 spam messages a day and stayed that way for several years. In any given month my gmail spam count sat between 3,000 to 6,000.
Over the past 10 years, as botnets have been taken down, those numbers have come down an order of magnitude. I still get between 20 - 30 spam messages a day on that account.