If you have email you get spam. There is no foolproof way to stopping spam but the question is still there, “why do I get so much spam and how do these people get my email address”.
The reason you receive so much spam is because sending out advertising through mass email is cheap and makes people a lot of money compared to the time they have to spend on it. Advertisers need to have a ridiculously low percentage of people decide to purchase their product to make it worth their time. When I say ridiculously low, this could be 1 in 1,000 or 10,000 or more. I am pretty sure if I email 10,000 people I can sell my product to at least one of them, couldn’t you?
The other reason you receive so much spam can be tied to P.T. Barnum’s famous quote “There is a sucker born every minute. I saw my opportunity and took it.” There are a lot of predatory people out there looking for people to take advantage of. By sending an email to 100,000 people it makes it very easy to find the innocent people who just don’t know any better. This is the very reason you shouldn’t respond to or forward emails from people you don’t know. No good ever comes from giving out your personal information to people you don’t know personally. Even if you do know them personally, they really don’t need any more information than what they already have. You don’t want to be the sucker that is being taken advantage of so please don’t give people your bank account information or Social Security Number.
So now you understand the why, what about the how. There are a couple of different ways that people can obtain your email address.
The first is through simple brute force. A program can be used to create common email addresses such as John smith @ yahoo.com or Mary Hall @ gmail . com (You will understand why the spaces are in there shortly). In this situation, no one ever obtained your email address, it was just guessed and there isn’t much you can do about this.
The second is through web crawlers. There are programs that search every single page on the internet looking for email addresses. These email addresses are compiled into lists that are then sold to spammers. If you have to post your email address online do something like this. My email address is MaryHall_RemoveEveryThingBetweenTheUnderscores_@gmail.com —- To send me emails please delete the underscores and everything between them.
The third is through email chains. Anytime you receive a funny email, a chain email, or otherwise from a friend it is almost guaranteed that your address will now make it onto a spammers mailing list. Every time an email is forwarded, it retains a history of everyone it was sent to and their email addresses. As the email moves farther and farther down the line it will eventually end up in the inbox of someone who collects and sells email addresses. They will then pull your address out of the email and you will end up on an email list. These emails will often travel through hundreds if not thousands of people before reaching an email harvester. So what does this mean? Every time you forward one of these messages, you are contributing to the worlds spam problem. Let your friends know, The less everyone forwards these chain mails, the harder we make it on spammers.
