how do they get my email?

[Jock]

Once again I'm beset by tons of junk email - nearly all wanting to sell me degrees, viagra, russian girls, finance, etc, etc

It seems to come in waves. I have several email addresses and the junk only comes to one of them. Very oddly the address in the title line is not even remotely like mine. I'm pi55ed off with cleaning up my inbox and the spam filters don't cope.


But my big question is - how do these ba**ards get my address in the first place. If only I knew who they were I'd melt their hard drives and rip their modems out. :swear:

[Bob]

Probably you gave your email address to a friend, who was infected with a virus that harvested it from that friend's computer.

[The Satirist]

Two ways mainly:

Random e-mail generators. If you check the headers, you'll often find that the email they use isn't even your email, but with scripts they can get the same email to multiple addresses.

Email Harvesting. Robots search the web for any occurrence of email addresses and save them for later use.

[Since1982]

Then theres "chat rooms" or "forums" if you go into any site that has chat or forums like "SkirtCafe" for instance and post your email address in your profile, anyone can then "sell" your email address to companies that specialize in the "email address trade". I have my email at AOL so I am allowed 7 email addresses and only use one for general usage. I don't find it too wearysome to just "select all" and delete, once a week in that one that gets "spam" emails. :shake: