Nowadays, you must have experienced the time that you’ve become so frustrated because of lots of special product offers inside your email address. What’s more confusing is that some emails are somewhat personalized, using terms such as ‘Dear John/Jane Doe’ or something to that effect. It can be accepted if you only have at least five of these per month. However, if you’re receiving this five times on a daily basis, it becomes very infuriating especially if you have to scroll and browse your mailbox carefully just to read your legitimate emails.
How Does a Spammer get Email Addresses?
Some people are now asking this question: How does a Spammer get my email address? There are at least four common ways to do it, ways which are listed below and explained in further detail:
- Buying Mailing Lists – The most common way to obtain lots of email addresses is to buy mailing lists, whether legally or illegally. Mailing lists are usually obtained from companies where most people are doing various registrations. And since those email addresses are being verified nowadays, the buyer is rest assured that about eighty to ninety percent of those who are in the list are active email addresses.
- Harvesting Programs – More commonly known as ‘crawl and scrape’ programs, these programs function by obtaining email addresses directly from the web. Since internet web pages’ support email addresses are also being listed by web crawlers, you can easily get thousands of addresses in just one sitting. However, these programs are somewhat expensive when compared to buying mailing lists. In addition to that, only a few are known to work as promised.
- Dictionary Programs – Just like a dictionary password hacker, the program is designed to list all email addresses that start from A to Z. Depending on your internet connection and computer speed, you can easily get loads of it. However, the disadvantage of this method is that even invalid addresses are also included in the entire list.
- Monthly Newsletter Subscriptions – Being the easiest way, most websites now require their readers to subscribe to their monthly newsletter in order for them to stay ‘updated’. The truth is, their computer systems are compiling those addresses not just for newsletter purposes but also for additional income. Since valid email addresses are very hard to get these days, they can easily sell their mailing list to those who are interested in buying it.
Why are Companies buying Email Addresses?
There’s only one reason why companies are spending a fortune for those valid email addresses, that is, for promotional purposes. Whether the company endorses a certain product or service, it’s way much better if they’re going to promote it directly to their potential customer’s email address.