How Do Spammers Get My Email Address?
All it takes is a quick look in your junk or spam folder to realise that online spammers have no problem getting their hands on your email address. But how does that happen? Here are a few of the most common ways that spammers get your email address:
Scraping the Internet
Wholesale ‘scrapes’ of the Internet are a tried-and-tested method of getting email addresses. Much in the way that search engines like Google regularly ‘crawl’ the Internet in order to index sites and make them more searchable, spammers can also deploy web crawlers that go out in search of any and every email address they can find.
If your email is listed on a social media account and visible to the public, then those web crawlers will eventually find it. The same goes if you have a website that lists contact information – something along the lines of ‘Contact us at name@example.com’. This is the reason that many forums provide on-site messaging services (think: Craigslist), allowing you to send emails through the website without actually displaying your email address to the recipient.
Wholesale Purchases
There’s nothing new about agencies offering B2B and B2C leads for sale to clients, and the same sort of service also exists in less scrupulous circles. Spammers sell or even trade email lists. Receiving cold calls from salespeople is irritating enough – but at least there’s the expectation that you can opt out and be left alone. When a spammer gets their hands on your address, they’re not going to let go so easily.
Clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ in Spam Emails
Most emails come with a ‘Click to unsubscribe’ button. If that email originates form an above-board company, then it’s reasonable to expect that clicking it will truly unsubscribe you.
What you may not realise is that spammers use random email generators to send out an absurdly high number of emails to potential email addresses. The moment you click ‘unsubscribe’, you’re telling them that this is, in fact, a valid email address. Given the fact that spammers begin from an unscrupulous position, they have no problem sending more spam to the email that you just confirmed is, indeed, a viable address.
Loading Images in HTML Emails
Getting you to click an ‘unsubscribe’ button is only one spammer tactic for emails. Another way to confirm that they’ve hit a winner with a random email is by embedding a small tracker (often called a ‘web bug’ or a ‘web beacon’) that can hide in a single pixel of an image.
When you click an email and load the image, that little beacon passes the information from your computer back to the place where it originated. If your email displays in HTML (and it almost certainly does unless you’ve specifically set it not to), then these little web bugs can be tripped when an image is loaded. In other words, all you have to do is open a spammy HTML email, and the damage is done.
As you can see, there are various ways that a spammer can obtain your email address – some of which rely on little more than trial and error. The best way to protect yourself is with comprehensive spam protection from MailCleaner. Contact us today to learn more about how we can protect your enterprise and employees from unwanted spam.