Where Do Spammers Get Your Address?

There are dozens of ways spammers determine which addresses to send junk spam email to. All it takes is making your email available via one of them, and you may need to use an anti-spam product indefinitely.

Spammers frequently use "robots" or "spiders" to crawl the web looking for email addresses. If you put your address on any web-page, you're at risk. One easy way around this is to post your address as text within a bitmap image. If that's not an option, you can obscure it in a way people can recognize such as, "rich@(removethispart)yahoo.com."

Some webmasters have taken to posting "honey pots" of bogus email addresses to make harvesting difficult for spammers. Email addresses have also been commonly harvested from the Usenet. When posting to the Usenet, consider using an alternate account you can abandon if needed. Sometimes emails sent to "honey pots" are processed to help provide data for spam e-mail filter software.

Spammers also obtain email addresses from public directories. One major example is the Internic domain database. Historically the entire database could be downloaded for easy processing by third-parties. Currently it is somewhat more secured. Domains can still be queried for their owner programmatically. If you own a domain, you will get unwanted e-mails. Using a separate email account can help minimize this problem. However, you may want notices for domain renewals going into your main inbox.

Sometimes hackers will crack into a private database of email addresses, and use them when sending junk messages. There is little users can do proactively to protect themselves from this.

There are several more ways your email address can end up on a spammers list. These will be documented in a subsequent article.

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