When ghosts spam

Most spam is sent to non-existent addresses, but that can still generate annoying messages for genuine users.

It's reported that as much as 97 per cent of email consists of spam, viruses, phishing or similar "malicious" content. That seems a lot.

One of the reasons the figure is so high is that the vast majority of spam is sent to addresses that just don't exist, have never existed, and will never exist.

In addition to harvesting addresses from websites, a lot of email addresses are just made up - perhaps sensible dictionary attacks using mailboxes such as "info@" or "sales@". But often seemingly random names or a real email address with some letters missing or added are used.

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