[maybird]

Not to defend ranker.com, but maybe [e-mail] really isn't in their database.

It's possible that someone is automatically forwarding a different address to maddox's inbox.

It'd be worth examining the SMTP header of one of these messages and tracing back the ownership of each relay.

[eli]

That's not actually his problem. They could easily add an unsubscribe link and make everyone's lives easier, but that would screw up the faux familiarity.

In fact, if this is a US company, I'm reasonably confident those messages are not CAN-SPAM compliant.

[biot]

The text of the personal reply makes this possibility unlikely:

  I'd really hate to lose the "Best Page In The Universe",
  maybe we can find something a bit more suited to your liking.

Obviously it's not just a random email address that someone forwarded on to Maddox if the site name is specifically mentioned.

[ovi256]

Biot, meet formmail. Formmail, mmet biot. So it goes.

[angrytapir]

It may well be that, but that doesn't make it okay. They shouldn't be building an email database by scraping, which is almost certainly what happened.

In a vaguely related note: I recently had a situation with an organisation that kept bulk emailing a plug for its conference and would ignore requests to eliminate all addresses using[mydomain].com from their database (they were sending email to aliases as well as actual mailboxes).