As you probably know there are companies that sell spammers cds that contain millions of valid email addresses. Did you ever wonder where do they get them? Well, they have lots of sources. The most lucrative is a chat room on a big site. Now think how many chat rooms like that exist?
Spammers use pieces of software that extract e-mail addresses from those places. Now think how many they can get in a single chat room at 6 pm? Unbelievable, right? But there is a weapon spammers use that is really terrific – it is called a spambot. How such a devil creation works? It works like a search engine that looks for the telltale “@” sign on a website. There are lots of websites and forums that require registration which means giving your own email address. Each big website has thousand of email addresses.
For a spammer visiting a few of those means millions of email addresses that can be easily spammed. But spammers have also more direct ways to get email addresses. They make other people give their addresses by themselves. Spammers create a website to attract people. The site usually contain information that you will get something for free and all you need to do is to submit your email address. If you do it then even a Spam filter will not save your inbox from spam.