They are hitting email providers
Not exactly, from my understanding, they were targeting Verizon email addresses.
I dunno; I just quoted you.
Yes, they are embedding the first part of the email address in the body of the email, with a hyperlink, and it appears to be coming from an individual. Until you look at the header you don't know it is from the eku.com. You probably didn't see the images because your computer picked it up as spam and did not load them.
and
There are a myriad of ways someone may have brained your email address.
Responding to both of you at once since your posts are related...
This was yet another example of why I'm incapable of being a teacher; my crystal clear is everybody else's muddy.
Here, in
real, clear detail, is what I was trying to explain:
(Do you ever post on WQXR.org, slolerner? I ask because I clearly remember having posted there while I was receiving the spam.)
When I post on WQXR, I post as user "xyz" with e-mail address "abc@verizon.net".
In the beginning, the spam e-mails opened with "Hi, abc"...understandable, but after a while, some of it began with "Hi, xyz", "xyz" being something that nobody could have known about without having had access to my WQXR (or other) post (elsewhere), because it's not a part of any e-mail address I've ever used. (User "xyz" is not exclusive to WQXR, but that's the only website I can think of on which I definitely used it around the critical time.)
Edit: I forgot about this, and it may be important: I do NOT log in to WQXR, nor is "xyz" my user name on any website that requires log-in. "xyz" is only transmitted in the body of whichever form I've filled out.
I don't think any of the "Hi, ...s" were hyperlinks, because they were in plain text...neither blue nor underlined. (I never tried clicking on one.)
And finally, the e-mails with those ?s in little blue boxes were not all identified as spam by Mail, and my pref is to load remote images, so, again, I dunno. (There was a thread not long ago that dealt with ?s in little blue boxes that didn't respond to clicks, but I don't remember the issue being resolved.)
Now that this issue has gone far beyond me I think I'll reinstate the account I deleted so I can pay closer attention to what goes on...assuming that the spamming picks up where it left off.