I thought it might help some of those poor websites out there we keep maligning to point out that, even if a website seems to have sold your addy, they might not have. If you gave them an address, they may have included it in an HTML form, perhaps 'hidden' that was crawled by a bot... like google, which would make your email addy more available to spammers.
So, it's possibly an error of omission rather than a crime of comission.
I thought it might help some of those poor websites out there we keep maligning to point out that, even if a website seems to have sold your addy, they might not have. If you gave them an address, they may have included it in an HTML form, perhaps 'hidden' that was crawled by a bot... like google, which would make your email addy more available to spammers.
So, it's possibly an error of omission rather than a crime of comission.