flightsim.com giving out email addresses?

I received an email solicitation about some software.

Is FLIGHTSIM.COM giving out email addresses?

Never has and never will.

Then how do you explain the 171 spam emails that have been sent to the address I used to sign up to fspilotshop.com (which is unique to that user account and has not been used anywhere else)?

Two support tickets I raised about that were deleted without comment...

After the second one I noted the ticket ID, Y8UHAMJ742

"Ticket not found! Please make sure you have entered the correct tracking ID!"

Then how do you explain the 171 spam emails that have been sent to the address I used to sign up to fspilotshop.com (which is unique to that user account and has not been used anywhere else)?

Be aware that anyone can fake an email address, and the only way to prevent spam is to block it, rather than relying on obscurity. Every mail host is getting tons of spam to random addresses to harvest which ones are valid.

Cheers!

Luke

Be aware that anyone can fake an email address, and the only way to prevent spam is to block it, rather than relying on obscurity. Every mail host is getting tons of spam to random addresses to harvest which ones are valid.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

This has nothing to do with fake From: addresses. Note that I do not claim that flightsim.com / fspilotshop.com has sent me spam. I only said that a lot of spam has been sent to that e-mail address (about 90% of the total amount of spam I get), and given the uniqueness of that particular address and the fact that I do not get the same spam e-mails to any other address at my domain, I conclude that someone got a copy of their customer database.

It is extremely unlikely that this particular e-mail address was randomly generated to send spam to. It is even more unlikely that this happened without any other address being generated first and also spammed. I have a "catch-all" e-mail account, so if it goes to whatever@mydomain, it goes to my inbox. I have seen random addresses in the past, but if spammers start guessing addresses, they still choose ones that are likely to exist, i.e. common ones ("sales@", "info@"), two- or three-character ones (possible initials) and "initial.lastname" or "firstname.lastname". None of these patterns applied to the e-mail address I used here.

@Nels Anderson: If these are separate businesses, does that mean that they also do not share any infrastructure (web servers, database servers, backup storage) and staff?

Also, what's with the deleted support tickets? There is no other way to contact fspilotshop.com (no, I am not going to resort to long-distance phone calls or getting a US VoIP account).

This is correct. FlightSim.Com and FS Pilot Shop do not share any staff or infrastructure.

In that case I apologize for wasting your time here. I inferred from fspilotshop.com's terms and conditions that I might reach someone by posting here:

FSPS, FSPilotShop.com and Flightsim.com offer you a wide variety of online products and services

but apparently all these websites share is a lawyer and the owner.

I can deal with the situation easily enough by filtering the spam and never buying at that shop again, knowing that the password I used there was not used anywhere else. I had hoped I could get fspilotshop.com to investigate and warn their customers to change passwords just in case. Apparently that's not going to happen. Who knows if those passwords were stored properly.