Sharon Said:

>In Mark's case, his personalized domain most likely
>comes from a company that issues domain names. His
>domain is really something completely different, and
>marktaw.mailshell.com (or whatever it is) is just an
>alias for another larger, registered domain, so his
>real email address is probably something like
>ar_marktaw--mailshell.com or 65124AU--mailshell.com or
>something - which is why it, too, can be hit with
>random spamming, in spite of the "unique" domain name.

With mailshell you get your own personal subdomain - marktaw - and anything before the at you can make up as you go along. It's sort of a spam filtering system where if you want to enter a contest, you create contest--yourname.mailshell.com.

If they were randomly generating my address based on my domain name, I'd be getting ar (at) as (at) at (at) as well... If they were blanketing every address (at)mailshell.com then I'd get it to other addresses as well.

I have to admit that I've used ar (at) other times, accidentaly because for a few days it was the default address I sent anything from (being first alphabetically).

So if not everyone is receiving spam than I have a few guesses why.

1. Not everyone contributes to the list, and the bot couldn't harvest you if you never posted.
2. You've used this address in other places.
3. Your spam guard caught it.
4. They sent one long ago with some sort of confirmation .gif or something (i.e. a call back to their server that you received it) and you opened it, and your email client doesn't filter these out.

Regards
Mark