Before we see how spammers, let's start with what Spam is?
Spam is the mass sending of a large number of e-mail messages. These messages are delivered without the recipients wanting them and without having caused correspondence with the sender. This is precisely why we call this type of mail, unsolicited mail or Spam.
How can spammers obtain your email address?
There are four main ways that spammers obtain their victims' email addresses:
- They illegally buy email address lists.
- They use "harvesting" programs that search the internet, such as Google Bots, and copy any text that contains the "@" character.
- They use "dictionary" (brute force) programs just like hackers do.
- You voluntarily and unconsciously provide your email address when you register or unsubscribe from online services.
The illegal purchase of email address lists
There are many people in key positions who can sell information they get from their work servers, for example. The lists can be sold on the black market or even on eBay. But in addition to legitimate employees of a company who can exploit their position, there are also hackers who steal customer lists and then sell them to spammers.
Harvesting programs, also known as crawl and scrape programs.
These applications “patrol” the internet, and “capture” any text that contains the character “@.” Of course, they can collect thousands of addresses in just one hour.
Programs that use dictionaries or brute force programs.
This is the third way to collect addresses to use for spam. Just like the programs used by hackers, they generate random combinations of letters and numbers from a dictionary and match them up as addresses. Of course, many of the results are inaccurate, but these programs can generate hundreds of thousands of addresses per hour, ensuring that at least some of them will be real.
Subscribe or unsubscribe to newsletter services.
Let's not forget to mention that many users hand over their emails to spammers themselves. A very common tactic is to receive a newsletter from somewhere you never signed up for. We usually look for the “unsubscribe” button to make sure we don't receive newsletters from them again. But this way you confirm that your email is being sent to a real person.
What can I do about all this?
Are you trying to hide your email from spammers?
Disguise your email address using obfuscation
Use a disposable email address
Use an email address encoding tool if you want to publish it somewhere
Avoid unsubscribes to newsletters you don't know the source of. Simply delete the email.
If spammers do get your email address, they will add it to a list that feeds spamming software (“ratware”). Then you know what happens, botnets will start bombarding your inbox with spam.
