Cleaning the catchall

Every couple of months I torture myself by going through the spam filter of my catchall email account and seeing which of my many throwaway email addresses is gathering the most spam. The usual is true this time as before, the largest actual email addresses are my old ones, my wife’s old username, my friend’s old account on my domain, etc. The typical spam traps all popped up as well, like orders, billing, sales, accounts, support, info, webmaster, contact, accounting, etc. (For those potential spammers out there, all of these are now deleted without even hitting the filter. ;)

What surprised me was the ones who had a fair number of hits that are just gibberish and had never existed. 

*******-0000rt-bybiggdave7 <– this one had 24 hits, I replaced the first 7 digits to obscure tracking data, but it was just letters and numbers. biggdave7 alone had 40 hits, despite having never been a real username.
*******-0000ft-ifbigj15 <– another like the above.
Two 15 letter gibberish words starting with X both had about 60 hits each.
My wife’s old account with a 7 tagged on the end had over 100 hits. Other old accounts with one letter or number added also had erratic hits from 9 up to 150. The one that had 150 hits, they added ANOTHER random letter to the end and threw 42 messages at it. They all seem to be a, 7, j, or n.
Several hundred were addresses that I had used before, with 2 letters lopped off the start, probably by malfunctioning spam software.
wsl,qsb,otfkn,carrqsb,bigj15 - about 70-100 hits each, never existed
uucp - 140 hits. Old communications protocol makes a comeback as a spamtrap!
majordomo - 100 hits. This proves that spammers are idiots. ;)
aunteyp, bubls62, adam_9_2_81, ll, ti - 10-30 each, addresses that has never existed

The singletons are interesting, because they’re mostly Phishing emails. Washinton Mutual and the like. 

What’s really surprising? Since I went to giving every website I dealt with their own personalized email address, none of those have gotten any spam other than Dotster (domain registrar) and one that I posted on my own website,