Email signatures increasing spam?

[shadowx]

I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on this, we've just started having email signatures here at work and part of the signature is our own email address (which seems silly, but it wasn't my idea). Since staff have done that I've noticed a lot more spam with one email in particular being sent to about 6 or 7 members of staff all in the To field of one email, that seems very specific to me as no-other email addresses were in the To field. I am wondering if this is related to the fact we now write our email addresses in our email signatures?

 

My theory goes that because the email address is written in plaintext at the bottom of the email it is being picked up by web scrapers at one end or the other. I admit my theory is somewhat lacking! It could of course be coincidence but I was wondering what other people thought? Email system on our end is self-hosted Exchange, not webmail.

[Duke5A]

It could be a coincidence. Do you have a directory of email addresses listed on the website? It could even be someone with your Exchange server setup on their smartphone using one of those scummy apps that mines your contact lists. There is just so many ways for these personal information trollers to find your data to sell to advertisers.