@GabeU
There are several spam types that use valid emails that were scraped from web sites or web sites that have used a script to obtain your addressbook. They do this so they can be used in phishing emails as well as to get you to click some other site or open some attachment that infects you with something really nasty.
Sometimes this is to make you one of the zombie horde, other times it's to install a keystroke stealer for when you login to your bank. Incidentally, your phone is not exempt either, as I see a tremendous amount of zombie spam coming from mobile phone systems.
I have had my own server and associated email addresses for several decades as I used to have a shortwave radio-related shareware business. The server has spamassassin, but it is sometimes very ineffective in what it ultimately does with it. As a result I've had to modify their spamassassin script to perform a multi-level spam protection based on whitelisting known email addresses, then determining whether anything else should go to the junk box or directly to /dev/nul. I still want things going to the junk box in case it's something valid that I later need to add to the whitelist.
Been working on collecting spam samples since April developing this (~4600 samples to date), and can safely say that in the past 7 days, after nearly 400 spams, I've had zero (0) spams leak into my inbox or junk box. 400 is actually a moderate level - I was getting close to 900 during a spamstorm in the last week of July.
After saying all that, I can say that I've never received any spam in my hughes.net account, since I never use it as a username for anything other than my Hughes account(s). If you're going to use it as a honeypot, expect to get stung.
* Disclaimer: I am a HughesNet customer and not a HughesNet employee. All of my comments are my own and do not necessarily represent HughesNet in any way.
