How Spammers get Your Email Address
12 06 07 - 18:57There are in fact three main ways that Spammers manage to keep up with you, two are quite easy to fight, but the third poses a few problems.
Method 1: Random Generation A lot of spammers simply generate random email addresses using the most common email providers (i.e. Hotmail, Gmail etc). Chances are that sooner or later one fo them will stumble across your email address, many also keep note of which addresses have been returned as invalid, meanning that by receiving that email you have confirmed your existence. There is very little you can do to combat this type of spam, but you can take steps to help prevent it.
It stands to reason that the easiest email addresses to generate are the obvious ones. if your email address is somename@hotmail.com then it will not be long before it is generated. To help thwart these attacks you need to include a string of numbers in your email address, these need to be easy to remember (it's hard to give your email address to friends if you do not know it!) but not too obvious. Using 1234 will only thwart the simplest of generators. Aim for 4 numbers or more, and try to use something memorable but be aware of privacy concerns. Your Date of birth is probably not the best thing to use, and your PIN code definitely is not. Where the numbers occur could have an effect, but in my experience as long as you use more than 5 numerals , placing them at the end is fine. So somename@hotmail.com could become somename67598234@hotmail.com although some6759name@hotmail.com would probably be sufficient.
The obvious downside to this method is it means setting up a new email address, and then telling all your contacts a new address.
Method 2: The Spammers get your address from you! You may un-wittingly give the spammers your address. The most obvious and prominent example is filling out forms on the net. Porn sites are especially notorious for this, you fill out a quick form and find an inbox full of spam. The best defence against this is either to use a secondary email address for these forms (thus relegating your spam to an account you never check unlesss something is expected) or to use a service such as spamgourmet. If the site will not accept a spamgourmet address then you can guess that you are going to receive un-solicited mail.
HOwever you can also give spammers your address more indirectly. If you post your email address to a forum, website or any other page on the net, a spammer could get it. As long as the public can see your email address then it is possible for so-called spambots to find and retrieve it. The way around this is easy, rather than posting "email me at somename@hotmail.com" post email me at "somename[REMOVE THIS FROM ADDRESS FIRST]@hotmail.com". This will defeat most bots, however if the page is viewed by a human they will be able to work out your email address (unfortunately this includes any would-be spam lords). Again your best bet is to post a spamgourmet address or a secondary email address.
Unfortunately the third popular method of harvesting email addresses is a little more difficult to combat. This is because
Your friends give spammers your address. We have all received emails saying "Send this to 12 friends in 10 minutes and....". This chain mail is un-solicited mail, but is not spam in itself. However next time you receive one open the email and look for email addresses. There are often hundreds (including yours for every time a friends has sent it to you, or you have sent it on), and the probabilites are that sooner or later the email will land in the inbox of someone else. This person could be perfectly willing to sell lists of known email addresses to spammers, or even worse could be the spam lord himself.
Why is this problem so hard to fight? Because not sending the email on is not enough, that will protect the people you would have sent it to, but your address has already been added by the person who sent it to you. If they sent it to you, then they probably sent it to other people as well, that email is likely to get sent on and on, constantly carrying your email address along with the ever growing list of other people. The only defence is to tell your friends not to send you chain mail at all. The problem is many won't listen and so they will continue to advertise your email address to an ever growing number of strangers.
If you have ever sent or received Chain mail it is quite possible that someone in China has access to your email address, in fact it is quite possible that I have received your email address in an email, Social networking on the ent but it is very hard to eliminate the 'bad men' and so sooner or later the spammers may get given your address. The next thing you know your inbox will be overflowing.
Spam can be beaten by taking a few sensible precautions, however it can only take one slip-up to set the deluge running again. Spam is the Cancer of the Internet, whilst many may be against internet Pornography, it is spam that forces itself upon you. Viruses and Malware can be actively beaten with the right precautions, but Spam sits and waits to pounce.
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