Thursday, June 25, 2009

How do spammers get email addresses?

Be aware that vicious spammers can collect the spam list in various ways, the best way to protect yourself from spam is not to give out the email address publicly.

Spammer can generally get your email address in the following ways:


From Spambot harvest
Spambots is a software like scrawl and spider, which basically follow links and grab email addresses from "mailto" links. Spambots can scour usernet/newsgroups/webpage/blogs and grab email addresses from post body and newsreader settings.

From a mailing list
Spammers join a mailing list, then gather the email addresses of the members, either from a list of the members provided by the mailing list software, or from people as they post.

From email reply
The spammer can got your email address from mail-servers using dictionary attacks then send you a email requesting for a reply. The email can be anything from "if you are interested please reply" or "if you want to be removed from the mailing list, please reply". If you replied, the spammer's email address was verified as valid by your email-server then the spammer can sent you more spam in the future.

From other spammers
Some spammers harvest the email address then sell it to other spammers using "Over 1 million email addresses on a CD"

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