The explanation I got when I worked there was that it was put in to help identify competitors that were blindly scraping our online catalog. There's a couple others if you keep digging.
When I worked with mailing lists, way back when; I always included my address under the name "J Random Dipesheet" or similar. We were generating "political" lists, but it was amazing how far afield those went, and the purposes they got used for.
I got dozens of everything AOL mailed, there for a while.
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The explanation I got when I worked there was that it was put in to help identify competitors that were blindly scraping our online catalog. There's a couple others if you keep digging.
Similar to the concept of "trap streets" on some maps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
When I worked with mailing lists, way back when; I always included my address under the name "J Random Dipesheet" or similar. We were generating "political" lists, but it was amazing how far afield those went, and the purposes they got used for.
I got dozens of everything AOL mailed, there for a while.