How did that spam find its way into your inbox and how to prevent it.–PC Pitstop.
How Spammers Got Your Email
By Bob Rankin
Spammers seem to have supernatural powers that enable them to guess email addresses accurately and quickly. But in reality, spammers harvest email addresses by pretty mundane means. You may even be contributing to the problem without realizing it. Here’s the scoop on how spammers get email addresses, and steps you can take to protect your inbox…
Is Your Email Address Vulnerable to Spammers?
It can be maddening when your email inbox gets a fresh load of spam dumped into it. Equally frustrating is when spammers spoof your address as the sender, and your friends all start asking why YOU are sending them unwanted sales pitches for dubious products. Understanding how spammers get ahold of your email address can help to prevent both of these problems.
Using web-crawling “spider” programs (not unlike the ones Google uses to index Web pages) spammers hunt down email addresses by looking for the telltale “@” symbol. Working swiftly and ceaselessly, spiders can harvest millions of email addresses automatically. To avoid being bitten by a spider, don’t put your email address on the Web. That means not posting it to online forums or personal web pages. If it’s included in online directories (school, work, clubs, etc.) ask to have it removed.
Scan the web with a Google search to see where your email address is available, and work towards becoming invisible. If you must make your email address visible in public, you can obscure your address by avoiding the “@” symbol, i.e., use “joe at blow dot com” instead, or create an image with the address instead.
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Excerpt shared with permission from Bob Rankin.
