Message from my dead sister

She's dead, spammers never die

[tangor]

In my mailbox. Today. A message from my sister (deceased for eight years) urging me to (at that point I deleted it).

Just a reminder, as we all know, that once on the web forever on the web. Add to that, once your address book is ripped...

I fixed her machine back then, but the damage had been done.

I wonder how many billions (sic) of email addresses past and present are STILL being hawked by the spammers?

[engine]

That's a sad reminder.

You're right about addresses being hawked around. I removed an address from our servers more than fifteen years ago and it still gets spam. There's no way it was harvested after that time; well, not harvested from me.
It could have been harvested from spam being sent to the address, or even spam being bounced, and sniffed by harvesting bots.

[piatkow]

here's no way it was harvested after that time

It could still have been in address books of infected machines.

All the spam that I have had supposedly from friend's addresses have had the address of friend A spoofed where friend B, who knows us both, has had his machine infected.