re Why you don't use your real name online. ... ... Some of you have heard this story.
In the ancient times Fidonet and Usenet participants posted with their real names. I have a few old posts about Y2K planning nonsense that are likely still visible in archives of alt.folklore.urban and alt.folklore.computers. Likewise there were old posts in the Yahoo Subaru and Trooper groups, before those were shut down last year.
Then - The summer before I created an account here, I started receiving bounce messages from ISP's, 'Recipient Unknown'. 10,000 of them!
Somebody had harvested my email and used it in the 'Reply To' field for his Viagra spam. Every other field in the bounces I received was unique - Posting IP, From, etc. Every 'From' was unique, none were me. All the text was unique in each message so far as I investigated except for the Viagra vendor url.
There were a couple of replies from real people, the one I remember was something like 'How dare you reveal our personal life on my State Government official email account!!!' with a footer showing she was in the tourism branch for a Southern state.

Sorry lady. Musta been some otherbody.
I've used this 'Where's Waldo?' username ever since.