How do the people who send us bulk messages get our e-mail adresses?

There are basically 3 ways the scammers and the spammers get our e-mail addresses.





Once your email address is on a spammers list it is almost impossible to get it off. Right now, your e-mail address (along with millions of others) is on a CD being sold from the back rooms of software shops from Bangladesh to Botswanna and from Norway to the Netherlands.





Method #1--The spam-industry has programs that are continusously crawling the web looking for the "@" symbol which is a sure sign the the word before it and the domain name after it is an e-mail address! Therefore, one should never post there e-mail address on any sort of website or webpage including guestbooks, forums, or user profiles such as Yahoo's.





Method #2--The spam-industry uses programs that try sending e-mail to all known domain names. Example: a program might start trying to send out e-mails to everyone starting with aaaaa@INVALID.com and continue down to zzzzz@INVALID.com. Using a longer e-mail address will make this harder to do.





Method #3-- The spammers and scammers purchase e-mail addresses from disreputable websites that require you to enter your e-mail address. The biggest offenders are sites that claim they are giving away "this and that" for free often require that you enter your e mail address in a web form. Guess where that address ends up? Yup, it is sold to the spammers!

How do the people who send us bulk messages get our e-mail adresses?
When you register your e-mail address with some web based organisations/companies, they will actually share or sell that information to a third party.

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