How a Spammer Gets Your Email Address

There are several ways spammers can obtain a person's email address either directly or indirectly. A spammer will commonly sell or trade lists of email addresses. So once an email address is on one list, it may be merged with other lists and might be nearly impossible to remove. To reduce spam, control the email address and how it is used.

Here are the most common ways spammers obtain your email addresses from you:

• Public Forums

  They have obtained the email address from one a post to a newsgroup, bulletin board or chat room. spammers use software programs, often referred to as "spidering" programs, to search for email addresses on these public forums.

• Web Sites

  Similarly, spammers have software that scans web sites for email addresses. If a customer has a personal web page, or administrate a web site, any email addresses on those pages may be located and added to email lists.

• Fake Unsubscription Links

  A person replied to spam or unwanted emails, asking to be removed by clicking a fake "reply to unsubscribe" link. Often when this is done, he or she is confirming that the email address is valid and is being monitored. This is something a spammer wants in an email address. This can result in even MORE spam. 

  This practice still continues, despite the passage of a federal anti-spam law called The Can Spam Act, that went into effect January 1, 2004, requiring a functioning "opt out" link or a legitimate "reply to unsubscribe" email address.

• Subscription to Services

  A person signed up for "free" or pay services on the Internet without checking the services. Check the privacy policy and terms of use to see if the email address will be added to a mailing list. Filling out web site forms, surveys, etc., also can get the email address added to a list.

• Mailing Lists

  A person intentionally signed up for a mailing list without checking their policies first. Hopefully, the person will receive only the emails he or she wants and not spam also.

• Unauthorized Use of Email Address

  Someone else has signed up to a mailing list and/or provided an email address that belongs to someone else to a company because the owner of the email address did not let inform friends and family that he or she wants to keep the email address private.

• Hit or Miss

  Spammers can also obtain the email address without the person's help, simply by guessing it. Surprisingly, this is a common process, and can be quite effective. Here's how it is done: 

  A spammer may start with a list of valid email addresses, then extract the user name portion of the email address, (everything before the @ sign) and try to use it with different providers, e.g., test_account@whatever.net, test_account@hotmail.com, test_account@yahoo.com, etc. This is a hit-or-miss approach to increase their existing mailing list that is often very successful.

• Common Email Usernames

  Spammers also use software programs to generate random user names from common names and words in the dictionary. Again, once they generate their list of user names, they just add a popular domain name to the end.