You filed a trademark, formed an LLC, or bought a domain. Here’s why your inbox exploded.

Somewhere in the last month you did one ordinary, responsible thing. You filed a trademark, registered an LLC, bought a domain, sent a press release, or put your email address on a website. Within days the pitches started: web design, funding, SEO, app development, an award you didn't enter, a listing that needs attention. None of it was addressed to the old you. All of it knows the new company's name.

That timing isn't a coincidence, and it isn't a leak. Each of those steps creates a public record, and there are businesses whose whole job is to read those records the day they appear and sell the result as a list. Everything below is legal and routine. That's the reason it never stops.

You filed a trademark

A trademark application is a public record from the moment it posts to the USPTO's database, usually within a few days of filing. The record includes the mark, the goods and services, the owner's name and mailing address, and the filing date. It's searchable by anyone, and it's downloadable in bulk.

Two kinds of businesses read that feed. The first sells things a new brand might plausibly want: a logo, a website, a domain that matches the mark. The second sends notices styled to look like official correspondence, offering registry listings, publication fees, and monitoring services that the trademark office never asked for. The second kind is common enough to get its own article.

You formed an LLC

Every state publishes its business registrations. Most let anyone search them, many let anyone download the new filings each week, and a few sell the complete list. The record has the entity name, the formation date, the registered agent's address, and often the organizer's name and address.

This is the single largest source of "you've been pre-approved" outreach. A new entity with no credit history is exactly the audience for working-capital pitches, which is why the loan offers tend to arrive first. Formation data also feeds the website, accounting, payroll, and insurance pitches, and because the mailing address is public, some of it arrives on paper.

You bought a domain

Registration contact details have mostly been hidden from public WHOIS since 2018, so your email address isn't what gets harvested here. The domain name itself is. New registrations show up in zone files and in commercial feeds of newly registered domains, and a name like northfield-plumbing.example tells a sender your trade and your town before your site has a single page.

Once there is a site, it gets crawled within days. The first thing an automated scan looks for is a contact page, and the second is anything it can describe as a problem: no mobile layout, a slow score, a missing policy page. The "we noticed some issues with your website" pitch is produced by exactly that scan.

You sent a press release

A newswire's job is distribution. The release, including the media contact's name, email address, and phone number, is syndicated to hundreds of sites that republish it in full. Each of those copies is crawled, and the contact block is the most structured, most reliably formatted piece of data on the page.

The pitches that follow a press release lean toward paid features, awards, podcast invitations, and conference attendee lists, because the release just told them you're the kind of company that wants attention.

You published your email address

An address on a web page is found by scrapers within days and resold as part of a "verified" list. Verified means a tool confirmed the mailbox accepts mail, not that you agreed to anything. The address then travels: list sellers buy from each other, so one scrape ends up in dozens of databases, and no single sender can remove you from all of them.

A contact form avoids the problem for visitors who want to reach you, but only if the form itself is set up to send mail properly. See the contact form article for the common way that goes wrong.

Why the pitches pass your spam filter

Each of these senders bought a list of real, recently active businesses, wrote one short message, and sent it in small batches from a domain set up correctly for authentication. That's a different problem from bulk mail, and filters are built for bulk mail. Why this email passed every spam check walks through the whole route.

What you can do about it

You can't take the public records back, and you shouldn't try to hide an LLC or a trademark. What you can control is where the mail lands.

• Use a different address for each registration. The trademark filing, the state filing, the domain account, and the newswire each get their own mailbox or alias. When the pitches arrive you'll know which record they came from, and you can retire an address without touching the others.
• Keep the owner's personal address out of every public record. A registered agent's address and a role mailbox do the job.
• Put a form on the site instead of a bare address, and send the form's mail through a real provider.
• Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for the new domain before anyone else does it for you. A new domain with no records is one that any sender can use in a From address. The domain report card shows what's missing.
• Expect the wave to taper. Most of the volume arrives in the first two or three months after a record posts, then settles to a trickle as the lists age.

What we're measuring

The claims above are the general pattern. We're seeding fresh records of each kind with addresses that exist nowhere else and logging the day each one gets its first pitch. When those numbers exist they'll replace the generalities here, and the records on this site that came in through a seeded address will say so.