Spam sent via our RSS feed email address

October 9, 2025 - updated daily

Do podcasts mean you get more spam? We wrote an article about the legality of spam - unwanted commercial email - sent to RSS feeds. And then we thought... since we generate our RSS feeds ourselves, we thought we’d produce a method to algorithmically generate email addresses in it, catch people sending us messages to those email addresses, and automatically analyse it for who sent it, who scraped our RSS feed, what they’re doing with it.

After three months, we wrote this article about our findings, highlighting some of the worse behaviour from email marketers; but this page will continue to update itself automatically every day, keeping an eye on the amount of spam we get.

Below is data on the latest emails we’ve had. At no point have we requested to be added to any mailing lists using the emails we use in our RSS feeds, and those email addresses are algorithmically generated, so everyone below is, by definition, sending us unsolicited commercial mail.

When we submit our podcast to some podcast directories, we have given them unique RSS feed URLs, which allows us to make some checks about where the data is being used.

Note: We removed all email addresses from our feeds on Oct 30 2022.

SPAM® is a trademark of Hormel Foods to describe their meat product, and we presume if we ever had contact with their lawyers, they’d be really excellent people, although we haven’t.

Emails per day

The above graph shows a significant growth in the number of emails, from May to mid-June. This might be because we give a different email address every time a scraper visits; and instead of changing the email address in their database, they merely added a new one. This goes against the principle of accuracy in privacy law in most jurisdictions.

All time top of the spammers

Since we turned on our spamtrap in May 2022, we have had the following number of emails: