Can I Outwit The Spammers?
In all honesty unless you’re a tech genius, the answer is probably no. Spammers use software that tries millions of different combinations of letters and words in an attempt to come up with live email accounts to which unwanted messages can be sent. Many of these combinations will not be real email addresses and the messages sent to these addresses will be undeliverable. Nevertheless, the rate of success is high enough for them to keep trying this approach. However, some of the more experienced operators use other, more sophisticated, techniques that make it considerably easier for them to obtain a large number of genuine email addresses to which they can send their spam.
How Do They Know My Address?
There have probably been many times in your life when you have opened a message in your inbox and wondered how the sender knew your email address. Below, we take a look at some of the ways in which spammers are able to obtain live email addresses.
- Subscriptions – There are many websites that offer to send you occasional newsletters if you sign up with your email address. Some of these are of course completely genuine, but some are set up specifically to capture addresses that can later be targeted with spam.
- Hacking Websites – Hacking into websites and stealing personal data belonging to users of that site is another popular way to obtain genuine email addresses. You might think that webmasters would take adequate measures to prevent this sort of attack but when even police websites are compromised, it is easy to see that this is not always the case.
- Hacking SMTP Servers – SMTP servers can handle millions of email messages every day so hacking into one can provide a rich source of addresses for spammers to target.
- Purchasing Email Lists – Some companies that collect contact details from subscribers to their websites are willing to sell the information they accumulate to third parties. Often, these third parties will be reputable commercial organisations who simply wish to send promotional emails to a list of people that are likely to be interested in the products and services they have to offer. However, spammers may also buy such email lists in order to make their life easier.
- Malware – Emails containing malware that steal people’s contact lists are a very popular way to find new targets for spam. Of course, such emails depend on you having no protection from malware and on opening the messages in question. If you are using effective anti spam software, you are much less likely to fall victim to such attacks.
- Web Crawlers – Software that crawls the Internet, making a note of any email addresses it finds on the websites it visits, can be used to harvest a large number of addresses in a relatively short space of time. There are ways that one can obfuscate email addresses to make it more difficult for them to be harvested in this manner but none are 100% effective.
The best way to reduce the likelihood that you will be targeted by spam is to be very selective when subscribing to corporate newsletters and to install an effective email spam filter. Although you may not be able to totally outwit the spammers there are certain measure you can take to reduce the amount you get.