How Spammers Get Your Email Address
Spam represents a large amount of mail sent, with thousands and thousands sent everyday worldwide. The worst part of it all is that some of the spam is coming from what appears to be your email address! So how exactly do spammers get your email address? Unfortunately, there are many ways spammers can access your email address with very few being legitimate.
Spammers use a technique known as “harvesting,” where they collect your email address from legitimate websites like USENET, chat rooms, message boards, AOL profile pages, and special interest group postings. They are sites you have visited and filled out a request info form leaving your contact information or ecommerce sites where you have placed orders.
Technology has aided in the creation of the spambot, which is the spammers ticket to getting your email address. Spambots harvest your information from these websites by sending out feelers that scan every page of the site, collecting any text containing the “@” symbol. They then compile the list of emails into a database that has the capability to send bulk emails, in turn sending out mass spam mail. Spammers also sell the harvested emails to other spammers, further spreading your email and its spam intake. Think of it as a bad form of networking, you tell 3 people who tell 3 people and so on.
Most websites are now requiring you to register with them before you can place an order or receive certain information from them. The thing to worry about here is that some sites are not as careful with your email as you would like them to be. Newsgroups are your biggest concern when it comes to letting your email address “slip” through the cracks and into the spammer’s hands. Most of these newsgroups do not worry themselves with hiding your email address, thus leaving your email address exposed and vulnerable to spammers. You will also have to worry about the websites that deliberately sell your information.
Spammers also use a method that targets a particular domain. They just guess and make up any possible combination of email addresses based on a domain name, such as @YourDomain.com. They take the mailing list of the addresses they have made up and send out the spam. The most vulnerable to this technique are corporate emails, because they have the distinct format of @BusinessName.com. Even though a large portion of these spam mails bounce, spammers don’t really care because they send out millions of spam mails daily. This leaves a small portion of spam to get through, which is enough for the spammer. This method is known as the brute force spam attack, and it is easy to see why.
A great defense against this is to make it as difficult as possible for the feelers to collect your email. When you fill out the register form replace the “@” symbol with “at.” This makes it more difficult to find your email since the spambots are looking for the “@” symbol. The best defense is to display your email as an image rather than text, making it even more difficult.
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