We have a paypal payment address that isn't made public. The only time this address is ever revealed is when requesting a payment from someone or if we pay someone.

It would probably be rare that clients are harvesting our paypal address to spam.

So that leads me to believe that the companies or people we are paying are dumping the e-mail into lists.

Anyone else see this as a trend?

I know we don't use the paypal address for signing up for anything.

Would seem that PayPal could do some things to help stop things like this.

I would bet it's more likely someone who had access to the address had some sort of email harvesting trojan/virus sitting around that picked it up. Not much that can be done about this, really.

I doubt a vendor would sell your contact info, if for no other reason than it's not worth the risk.

Do you have it listed on your knowledgebase perhaps? Is it a common e-mail like sales or paypal @ domain.com?

I would bet it's more likely someone who had access to the address had some sort of email harvesting trojan/virus sitting around that picked it up. Not much that can be done about this, really.

What he said.

I don;t think paypal can do anything such from their end. Better change the email address for paypal payments in every 6 months..

We change our PayPal email address every 3 months, anyway we didn't have any problems with spam to this email addresses.

I actually have problems with spams in my paypal email id.I'm very sure that our customers only harvesting our paypal address to spam.As we dont use it else where other than accepting/giving out payment.
So as @madlymasterful2018 suggested i'm changing my paypal email id to new one every 4 months..

Thanks

The possibility of our paypal address getting spam exists.

Harversters will source for any active email address as this is money to them but I don't think paypal can stop or even bother...

Well I think what we might do is just permit email from paypal to the paypal address.

I guess that would solve the spam problem.

While I agree PayPal has nothing to do with this, perhaps it's time for PayPal to do some things to protect email addresses.

Such as when paying someone through the website being able to type in the company name rather then an email address. I know the email address model exists for convenience, but it helps spammers.

I don't think our paypal address is currently out there, a google search of it shows nothing. It's nothing hard to find, however I know it's not used to opt-into mailing lists!