How Spammers Get Your Email Address

E-mail spammers don’t get your address because you're on the distribution list of legitimate e-mail publications. These days, it is a very rare mailing list that is completely open. That is not to say that there aren’t any secure mailing lists, but it is very easy to get a hold of email addresses these days.

So where do these spammers get your address you may be wondering? The number one place that people used to use were posts on internet forums, and message boards. Newsgroups are "publicly" readable; whether you post your message on your local ISP or on a major service of some other kind, your message is typically spread worldwide by Usenet in a matter of hours, and it; as well as your email is quickly picked up by advertisers.

The current most-common place to get your address is from actual web pages. If your e-mail address is listed on a web page anywhere on the internet at all, such as from a contact section especially if that page is listed in a search engine or directory, spammers will find it. To know if this is possible all that you have to do is trying searching for your own e-mail address in Google. If you can find it there, spammers can too.

Spammers get a hold of fresh addresses by going to web sites and scanning for e-mail addresses anywhere on the site. The software that they use can, for instance, ask a search engine for any page that has any keyword in it that they choose and grab the addresses off those pages for a specific list of people that have an interest in that keyword. It takes only minutes to gather thousands of addresses out of this search.

The main point here is that spammers often search through public forums and internet web pages for the “@” symbol so that they add your email address to their files. If you don’t post them directly and instead type “yourname_at_suchandsuch.com, their software can’t see it as a potential email address and will move past it. If you are determined to post your email address online, then you have to be prepared for spam, and in this case a filter program may be more useful to you. The trick is for you to not open or answer any of these emails at all!