Spammers use a number of methods to get to your email address.
� Web pages: This is the easiest way for spammers to get hold of your email address. There are search engines, for example www.roverbot.com which can be programmed to browse web-pages, usually searching for the HTML 'mailto:' tag, and capturing the addresses so revealed, for future junk-mail use.
� Mailing lists: It is possible to send a message to a list-server and get it to deliver a list of the people subscribed to a particular mailing-list, or a list of subscribers known on all lists on that server. If the address-grabbing is done by named lists, this readily yields collections of addresses whose users are all interested in a particular topic; hence such lists are useful for targeted junk-email.
� Usenet Newsgroups: There are professional and private junk-mail operators who take a partial or full Usenet news-feed, and filter it, extracting the "From:" addresses of all postings, and building them into address-databases.
� Buying an email address list: You can buy a list of email addresses that were harvested via other methods, e.g. Someone harvesting email addresses from UseNet and sells the list either to a company that wishes to advertise via email.
A company who got the email addresses legitimately (e.g. A magazine that asks subscribers for their email in order to keep in touch over the Internet) may sell the list to earn that extra income.
� White and yellow pages: There are various sites that serve as white pages. Yellow pages now have an email directory on the web. Those white and yellow pages contain addresses from various sources, e.g. From UseNet, but sometimes your E-mail address will be registered for you. Spammers go through those directories in order to get email addresses. Most directories prohibit email address harvesting by spammers, but as those databases have a large databases of email addresses and names.
� Web pages: This is the easiest way for spammers to get hold of your email address. There are search engines, for example www.roverbot.com which can be programmed to browse web-pages, usually searching for the HTML 'mailto:' tag, and capturing the addresses so revealed, for future junk-mail use.
� Mailing lists: It is possible to send a message to a list-server and get it to deliver a list of the people subscribed to a particular mailing-list, or a list of subscribers known on all lists on that server. If the address-grabbing is done by named lists, this readily yields collections of addresses whose users are all interested in a particular topic; hence such lists are useful for targeted junk-email.
� Usenet Newsgroups: There are professional and private junk-mail operators who take a partial or full Usenet news-feed, and filter it, extracting the "From:" addresses of all postings, and building them into address-databases.
� Buying an email address list: You can buy a list of email addresses that were harvested via other methods, e.g. Someone harvesting email addresses from UseNet and sells the list either to a company that wishes to advertise via email.
A company who got the email addresses legitimately (e.g. A magazine that asks subscribers for their email in order to keep in touch over the Internet) may sell the list to earn that extra income.
� White and yellow pages: There are various sites that serve as white pages. Yellow pages now have an email directory on the web. Those white and yellow pages contain addresses from various sources, e.g. From UseNet, but sometimes your E-mail address will be registered for you. Spammers go through those directories in order to get email addresses. Most directories prohibit email address harvesting by spammers, but as those databases have a large databases of email addresses and names.