[kunle]

You can collapse all these into one step - find an organization they are associated with (like their employer), and take the formats (Johnd@, jdoe@ etc). Stick one into the "To" field, and the remaining into the BCC field. You'll end up with about 8 email addresses total, and 7 will bounce. This works 95% of the time.

Caveat - its probably a bit spammy but the folks I learned this from have to my knowledge never been banned. Use at your own peril.

[duncanmcdowell]

Important to use a dummy email account for these purposes - you didn't mention this as it might be obvious, but the last thing you want to do is use this method with the email address you actually want to use to communicate with the person in question.

[ktsmith]

Or none will bounce, one or two might get to someone and the rest will be captured and used to automatically mark you as a spammer.

[Bill_Dimm]

Bingo. APC pulled the spam trick on me years ago. I filled out one of their warranty cards and I'm pretty sure I provided no email address (not wanting any spam). At the time I was catching all email addresses on my domain in one account and I got a pile of emails from APC with various permutations of my name as an email address -- email addresses that I never would have used or given to anyone even though I would receive any emails that were sent to them. Guess what company I'll never buy from again (the fact that their UPSs fail without any warning doesn't help, either).

[kunle]

Interesting - all I've seen when I've used this technique in the past is emails bouncing. Will keep an eye out for this.

[ktsmith]

I actively do this. Typically when someone is just trying dozens of permutations of my email addresses they aren't someone I want to talk to or are trying to sell me something.