| How Does A Spammer Get Your Email?
So just how do spammers get your email address? Interesting Question.
Well one thing is certain they don’t wait for you to contact them!
Here is a few of ways they can obtain your email address:
If you used your email address to signup for something on the Web and the company you signed up with sold your address.
Most companies do not and will not sell the addresses of subscribers, customers, or members, but then there are always some companies that will! Their rights, if that’s what you want to call it, is usually hidden in their license agreements that most people don't read, who does?
Another way is maybe you have signed up for a Web membership, program, and/or a newsletter. Again somewhere hidden in the license agreement was a clause that reads along the lines of, ‘we may give your address to trusted third-party partners that we work with’. You don't know how trusted these 3rd-parties are, how could you?. What will these 3rd parties do with your email address? Give it to another so called ‘trusted’ 3rd party. Now that’s when the problem really starts: once you allow (by not reading the license agreement) a company to start sending your address to others, the ball is rolling and rolling. Soon your email address ends up on a CD with millions of other valid email addresses and sold to professional spammers who will sell it to other professional spammers.
Another way? When you click on a link in a newsletter you never subscribed to, which says ‘Unsubscribe’ from it. Think about this, how can you unsubscribe from a newsletter that you never subscribed to in the first place? I wonder just how many millions have fallen for this trick. Easy, they get so fed up of unsubscribed newsletters that they keep getting that they fall for the "unsubscribe" trick.
Once the link to unsubscribe is clicked, the spammer knows your address is good and that you're taking action by clicking links in spam - your address just became more valuable to spammers because you just proved that you are using that email address.
Clicking on the ‘Unsubscribe’ links Is always fatal! All that will happen is that you will get more and more spam.
OK, now we are on a roll, Next, maybe you bought something from a spammed email It goes without saying, don’t ever be silly enough to buy anything from a spammer's advert. Because if you do, you may as well close whatever email account you were using and get a new one, what happens is you have just told the spammer that you are willing to roll over and buy his junk, next step – another thousand spam emails.
Maybe you clicked a link to see a ‘postcard’ from an ‘anonymous’ friend, think about this for a second, why would somebody you don’t know send you a postcard? What happens, well its easy you just installed a spambot or trojan on your computer. The bot will then harvest email addresses from your address book, email messages, etc. and sent them automatically back to the spammer - that is all email addresses you have.
The last I will list, but not the last way, is if you belong to an Internet forum that allows you to post and include an unprotected email address (Ours DOSNT)! Spammers use spam harvesters to scour the net looking for addresses in forums, message boards, and guest books.
Once your email address is on the net in unprotected forums, you're going to be hammered with spam. One way if you must write your email in a forum post, is to write it as alan.wade at pcsupportforums.com for example, that way the havesters wont recognise it as an email address.
Of course there are many other ways that spammers can get your email address, what I have written is just the most popular ways.
Its not easy keeping the spammers at bay but one word of advice that so many people never think about.Be careful with any AntiSpam program you buy, if like SpamBully, it has the feature to kick back spam to the spammers, all you have done is told them that your email is valid!
Alan Wade – PCSupportForums 2008 | 
