Spam introduction

How spammers get your email address

Easy way to avoid spam

Spam filters

Motivation for becomming a spammer

Your cost of spam

How spammers operate

Is spamming illegal?

Tracing the sender of spam

Attract women

Fun Spam

Annoyed yet?

Bill Gates also got spam

Spam glossary

How spammers get your email address

Have you ever wondered how the people sending you spam email got your email address in the first place?

Two major sources of email addresses are the web and newsgroups.

In many ways similar to the way Google spiders the web, email addresses are collected. Programs that follows all links on webpages, and checks every pages for words that looks like : zzz@yy.com .Or contain a mailto: html tag. This is not a very complicated task, you can download such programs from the web and do it yourself.

The same way for newsgroups, programs exists that you can scoop through a lot of news groups and extract the sender email address and other emails from the messages.

If you do not want to do this your self there are plenty of people on the web that sells cds with millions of email addresses on for a couple of dollars. Does it make you angry that people are making money selling your email address for spamming?

Web and newsgroups are good sources for email addresses, but the people that do this are always looking for new ways to get fresh emails. So potentially everywhere you leave your email address you have a chance of increasing your spam. Webpages can give email addresses people enter on their webpages to others. But that is not thinking big, all places where your email appears in text have the potential to automatically be collected for spamming. For example if you are chatting on irc and you type your email in the chat, your email can be collected for spamming.

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