How do You Get Spam Email?

How do spammers get one of your email addresses anyway? They can do this in one of several ways:

•Address books stolen from computers infected with viruses. This could be the address book in any computer used by any person who has received an email directly or via forwarding from you (or where you are in the CC list). This is why you should not forward emails with long CC lists directly to others, since that is placing many people at jeopardy at getting their email address stolen.

•Address lists stolen from servers. These are the well-known instances in the past few years where someone hacked into a corporate or government server and stole an address list or other personal information.

•Purchased lists: Direct mail advertising and spammer organizations often sell address lists to others.

•Random and "dictionary" attacks: This is especially a problem if the email system for a domain doesn't prevent repetitious attacks to huge numbers of addresses at that domain. Some domains have developed various techniques to eliminate the vast majority of attacks to it's customers, as long as you don't forward email from one email account to another.

•Another big problem is common words or names (or such words with an easy to guess number after them). If your email address is john @ domain.x, you will probably get spam!

•Some spammers have been known to search online forums and websites for email addresses.

Because of the first issue (addresses stolen by viruses from computers of those who have received an email from you, even indirectly), and the fact that even most active but unused email addresses can be eventually guessed after thousands or millions of guesses, nearly all email addresses will eventually get spam. The only real way to keep this from happening would be to use a very long random email address, and change it every time you sent an email. But then no friends could send you an email! So spam filtering at domain servers is required to keep away nearly all of the huge quantity of incoming spam.

Thanks for the tips. There is a new kid on the block that is generating Spam also. Facebook. The apps that you click on to play Zoo or Farmville harvest your email, your friends emails, and friends of those friends.

Maybe my spam will stop now that I have deleted my FB account.
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I do have a facebook account but don't use any of the apps, and have the privacy setting on so only friends can see my stuff.

My yahoo account was compromised a couple of months ago, people in my address book where getting nasty spam. I reported it to yahoo but I wasn't satisfied with their answer, so I did open a new Gmail account. I removed all the contacts from the yahoo account and changed the password which I changed elsewhere also.

I am not on any social sites. I yahoo and msn messenger and that is all I care to have. I will never be on a social site. I have gotten many invitations and deleted them.