Friday, August 22, 2008

How Spammers Get Email Addresses


How Spammers Get Addresses ? There are so many companies which sell CDs with plenty of valid e-mail addresses. With MS Word, you'd easily make those addresses into lines of 100 addresses each, and then cut and paste those lines in the "To:" field of any e-mail program.The problem with spam is, incredibly easy to send. Practically costs nothing to send it. Reply rate is also very less 1 is to 1000 ratio of e-mails, Where does a company get millions of valid e-mail addresses to put on a CD and sell to you? There are a number of primary sources.

1)
newsgroups & chat rooms, Newbies often provide their screen names, or keep valid e-mail addresses, in newsgroups. Spammers do use a software to extract the screen names and e-mail addresses automatically.


2)
The Web itself. There are thousands of Web sites, The programs that do the spidering is spambots, searchs the Web specifically looking for "@" sign that indicates an e-mail address.


3)
Websites created ONLY to attract e-mail addresses. Just like, a spammer creates a site that says, "Win £1 million!!!, ONLY type your e-mail address here!" In the past, lots of large sites also sold the e-mail addresses of their members. Or the sites created "opt-in" e-mail lists by asking, "Would you like to receive e-mail newsletters from our partners?" If you answered yes, your address was then sold to a spammer.


Probably the most common source of e-mail addresses, however, is a "dictionary" search of the e-mail servers of large e-mail hosting companies like MSN, AOL or Hotmail. In the article Hotmail: A Spammer's Paradise?, the author describes the process:
A dictionary attack utilizes software that opens a connection to the target mail server and then rapidly submits millions of random e-mail addresses. Multiple adresses have slight variations, such as "tanmya@hotmail.com" and "tamnay@hotmail.com." The software then checks which addresses are "live," and adds those addresses to the spammer's list. These lists are typically resold to many other spammers. E-mail addresses generally are not private. Once a spammer gets a hold of your e-mail address and starts sharing it with other spammers, you are likely to get a lot of spam.

So keep in might, You are not safe and secured in this Virtual world!!!

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