on fri sep NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER NUMBERpm NUMBER carlo URL wrote so it seems to me that they do clean up their lists but only when a spam fails to deliver or can t they detect that what do spammers do with email addresses in their database that are undeliverable for a few years do they still continue to spam them well here s my semi coherent rant for the moment i have NUMBER spamtraps on my machine you can multiply that by each domain if you really want to the vast majority all but say NUMBER have never ever existed yet spammers would semi continuously connect try to deliver mail to NUMBER of them disconnect connect again try delivering to NUMBER more over and over they kept getting user unknown until i got around to making them spamtraps so my evidence would suggest that it depends who you re dealing with if your business is to sell address lists to people who would then spam it s in your best interest to never clean your list therefore you can say NUMBER million email addresses and not technically be lying even if the majority of them don t work if you re a spammer you d want to know who doesn t actually exist but then again you don t really care you probably want to relay through someone so it s harder to trace you if you could you d send to every email address available you don t want to setup a valid bounce address because again it s easy to trace you so i would say this if you technically spam people but actually think you re running a legit service you probably really do have a way of opting out even though the user didn t opt in and you probably don t relay and you probably pay attention to bounces everyone else doesn t really care that s my view anyway randomly generated tagline now you can do that thing with your hands it s ok prof farr 