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The easiest way for spammers to get your address is to ask you for it.
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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
How spammers get your e-mail address


May 4, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   We're all getting buried under an avalanche of spam, the name given to unwanted commercial e-mail. Dealing with it doesn't have to be difficult.
   This week I'll tell you how to keep spammers from picking up your e-mail address, and next week I'll take a look at software for Windows and Mac OS X that can block spam before you ever see it.
   Spam accounts for about half of all the electronic mail a typical Internet user gets each day. Some users get a lot more -- as much as 80 percent spam in many cases -- and some get a great deal less.
   Why do some of us get a ton of spam each day while others seem almost immune? The secret is a simple matter of visibility. Spammers have three main ways of getting your e-mail address -- guessing it, trolling for it (such as picking it up from sites where you've posted messages) and simply asking you to give it to them.
   Let's look at these one by one. You might be surprised at what is actually going on.
   GUESSING YOUR ADDRESS: Spammers don't actually "guess" your e-mail address the way a contestant thinks up an answer on a quiz show; they generate serial addresses and send spam to all of them, hoping a few will hit the target. One address might be "ajones," with the next ones "bjones" and "cjones."
   The rest of the address, following the @ sign, is often created from known Internet provider names. The full addresses might look like this: asmith@aol.com, bsmith@aol.com and csmith@aol.com. Spammers either generate their own lists or buy them from marketing companies.
   TROLLING FOR VICTIMS: Spammers and marketing companies scour the Internet for e-mail addresses. They find them on public messages posted in news groups, for example. They also find them by looking at personal Web pages. Most of us put our e-mail address on our personal home page.
   ASKING YOU TO GIVE THEM YOUR ADDRESS: The easiest way for spammers to get your address is to ask you for it. You might think you'd never give a spammer such information, but millions of Internet users obviously do it every year.
   It's a scam. Here's how it works:
   You get an e-mail from someone you don't know or a company you've never heard of. You're not interested in whatever the sender is pitching, and you notice a handy link in the e-mail that lets you get off the mailing list you've just found yourself on. It says "Click here if you want to be removed from this list" or "Click here to unsubscribe."
   The wording can vary -- spammers are clever, and you'll see other forms of this same scam -- but the intent is always the same. They want you to volunteer your e-mail address.
   So you click on that link and fill out a form with your name and e-mail address or perhaps just your e-mail address. (Spammers don't need your name to shoot spam at you. They just need to know where the bulls eye is.)
   When the spammer gets your reply, you're taken off the current list of unconfirmed e-mail recipients and put on a much more valuable list -- the one that contains valid, confirmed, I'm-a-sucker-for-you e-mail identities.
   These are the main ways spammers get you in their sites. There are other ways, which we'll look at another time.
   Next: How to block spam.