Spam: How do they know my email address?

One of the biggest headaches for every user is the amount of spam that we receive everyday in our mailboxes. I remember the days when you only used to get emails from people you know and which contain relevant content – nowadays the ratio is quite the opposite and you might end up getting more unsolicited mail than legitimate ones.

Many are perplexed as to how these spammers manage to get their email address but when you think about it, its not that difficult. Take big email service providers such as yahoo or Hotmail. These have millions of email accounts created – obviously all with the common domain (i.e. hotmail.com for Hotmail accounts etc.). Have you ever tried to register an email address with these companies and found out that the username you want is already taken? Congratulations! You just found a spammable email address.

This is one of the most common tricks in the book for spammers – simply create as much usernames as possible for the most common domains, chances are that the majority are actually legitimate email addresses which they could spam. You might be saying that this is quite a laborious process – which is true – but spammers wouldn’t stop at just creating these email addresses, they will want to make money out of it and sell these addresses to others or use them themselves to advertise their products.

Stop junk mail from reaching your mailbox

Obviously, spammers don’t stop at only this. They also use technology and what are called address harvesting bots. This is simply a piece of software that works quite similar to search engines. These bots constantly access webpages and links looking for an ‘@” sign – once found, they grab the email address and harvest it. By the end of the day, the spammers end up with a database full of email addresses and all they did was click the ‘Go’ button and let the bot do the work.

These are only a couple of methods that spammers use to get hold of email addresses – but how can the users protect themselves against these? There are various actions that you could take in order to avoid/reduce spam:

1. Use a disposable email address – when using forums etc., don’t register your normal address. This will avoid having spam mixed with your legitimate emails.
2. Disguise your email address – if you are going to display your address online, don’t write the address as it is but write it as gamsec [at] gmail.com – the users will know how to use it but the bots won’t recognise it
3. Use an image instead of text – if you look at FaceBook, the email is not written in plain text but as an image – this stops bots from grabbing the address

These are only a few tricks on how to protect your email address. Next we’ll be looking at some software products that we can use to help us filter out spam automatically.