I've had boards made by a couple of Chinese suppliers.
Now I seem to get emails from all over the place trying to get me to place orders.
I can't imagine the original suppliers would be selling their mailing lists to rivals.
Perhaps they need to look at the honesty of their employees.
Sylvia.
More likely they had them lifted by malware.
That too. It's likely that no-one cared where your email address went.
Anyone I run an email service for is told from the start that their email address will quickly become known to the world, particularly if they send messages to other countries.
Most of my email cusomers have no need to email to/from anyone in about 90% or more of the world's countries, so I blackhole those countries from the email service. Big providers can't do that because they may have customers in most countries.
That's why I use a made up email address when contacting through web sites, their domain URL @ my domain URL. I've even gotten spam at xilinx.com@... although I suspect that was actually shared through a seminar setting where the local rep shared it. Still...
This does cause problems sometimes. I can't order anything at autozone.com even though they accepted the email address initially and are happy to send me spam. I called about this and the guy said they have filters that must have been added after I set up my account. The web site won't even let me edit my settings! lol
Others are simply hesitant to send an email to the address I made up for them. They think it must be an error. Then there are companies who refuse to send me an email unless I "verify" the address to them as if their records must be unreliable. I'm not sure that is because of the email address. I think they just have a policy of verifying email addresses before sending anything other than spam to them. Yeah, they are happy to shotgun spam without regard. I'm talking about credit card companies and the like. Even though you have a card with them they want to spam you with email and paper mail.
I get those emails as well although I have not ordered PC boards. So it is not certain that is the source of the spread.
I have ordered many items at Aliexpress but although I sometimes get a message from a store where I ordered before, the majority of those spam messages does not come in on the address I use on Aliexpress but on addresses I used 20 years ago on Usenet etc.
They get collected into generic mailing lists (probably by category) and the address never gets dropped from them, even addresses that have been invalid for over 10 years still get daily spam.
Make sure you use a different address for different purposes, so you can abandon addresses when it gets too bad.
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