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Comment by ploum | Hacker News Reader

This opened up my eyes. My pseudo is "ploum" and I have the ploum.net domain since 2006/2007. I’ve used the ploum@ploum.net adress for years but it became unbearable regarding spam.

It took me this post to make the link that, in France, "ploum ploum" means "whatever random thing" and that surely people are filling "ploum@ploum" as a random address in every web form.

Must be even worse for the ploum.com domain.

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That's a weird take. I am French, I have never heard (except for Téléphone's song) that expression. The closest thing that comes to mind is "plouf plouf".

Wouldn't it simply be because you have been using (and publicly disclosing) that mail address for quite some time and it probably became part of each and every email list script kiddies are able to get their hands on?

French canadian here and same comment, ploum does not mean anything. Even plouf (for us).

Belgian here. I don’t use "ploum ploum" either (else I would never have this pseudo) but realized over the years that a number of people use this expression. (look on twitter for "ploum ploum" for example).

And, yes, lot of spam is because this email was in multiple exposed account but I’ve received lot and lot of "fresh subscription/confirm your emails" where it was obvious people were simply writing whatever in a field.

This is the explanation:

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/pic/orig/media%2FFm1yTf1aMAIC...

Ploum-ploum is only used in the south-east of France.

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