NY wrote
Rod Speed wrote

And when I was a teenager, I deliberately misspelled
my name with some of the free trial subs to mags like
Time and Life and that would **** the system.

And my writing is so atrocious that plenty even
manage to **** up my last name, even ending
up with weird variations like Spego once.

Doing that, or even just inventing a variety of different fictitious
middle initials, can be a very good way of identifying where spammers have
got your name from.

Yeah, thats why I did that with the free trial mag subs.

If you only ever used a middle initial of B with Time, and with no-one
else, any spammers or junk mailers that use it must have got your details
from Time's mailing list.