Some organizations will setup a Honeypot/blackhole CEO email using common corporate email designs, then the actual CEO email will be something else entirely. One organization I worked at the CEO email was a actually just a randomized string

But in the case of Valve, Gabe Newell has generally encouraged people to email him which is unusually open compared to many companies whose leadership will ignore or even threaten anyone who stumbles into their inbox

That is certainly true, I guess I needed to specifically call out that he actually does reply. And this has been a constant recurring “rediscovery” every few years that GabeN personally responds to that email.

That also wasn’t the particular point I was even talking about. The point was that a previous dev would most likely still have connections inside Valve given how easy it is for outsiders. And that even if they had zero connections, again, it would be super easy to get a response.

This is all just speculation, but a relatively confident one.