May 28 2008
How Did the Spammer Get My Address?
It is pretty commonly known that if you put your email address up on a website (your site or a profile) it will be found by the spammers. The spammers use programs that go through the Internet scanning any and all pages they can find to get email addresses off of it (commonly looking for a @ sign).
Also, if you have a website and are the lucky one who gets an “info@”, “sales@” or “support@” or a few other common ones, you will get spammed. The spammers know about those and automatically add them to the list.
They can also purchase lists and abuse the names (if someone gets your email address and decides to sell it, there you go.) For example, I made a brand new email address for my netflix account. Didn’t use the email address for anything else, no one has it or anything. It gets bombarded with spam, so netflix sold my email address.
The other more surprising tactic is that the spammers will find all the domains names registered around the world. Including of course, “aol.com”, “hotmail.com”, “gmail.com”, “yahoo.com” and so on and then just run programs to send the email to every possible name.
They do this systematically without even knowing if the email address is legitimate or not. Start with “a@” and then “ab@” and so on.
So sometimes you are getting an email from a spammer who doesn’t know if he has hit the jack-pot of a live person or not. This is where the recommendation to never answer spam messages, don’t download the images and so on come from. All of this can alert the spammer that they have hit the jack-pot.
Most spammers don’t follow the rules, so may never take you off the email list, just spam you more. (Rules are for the rule-followers, not the rule-breakers).
Hope this helps you minimize your spam.
