How do Spammers get Email Addresses?

Most spammers get your E-mail from the E-mail address CDs you've seen advertised in Spam. Your address gets onto these CDs in the following ways:

Web-scrapers. Spammers run specialized web crawlers, software that scans web sites looking for E-mail addresses and follows links to other pages to crawl the web. If your E-mail address is on a web page somewhere, including web-based discussion forums, spammers will find it.
USENET. Spammers scan all postings to USENET for E-mail addresses.
Domain contact (or "whois") databases. Spammers scan the public contact information posted for domain registrations. Network Solutions, Inc. (now Verisign), the company given a virtual monopoly on domain operations, also sells this database to interested parties, and has been known to send Spam to domain contacts itself.

Spammers may also target you in the following ways:

Companies that ask for your E-mail address for any reason, especially for anything that doesn't require an E-mail response, are usually harvesting it for marketing purposes. Companies sell these addresses to each other. Even if a company says it won't sell or misuse your address, they may change their policy at a later date. Companies are also bought and sold, and E-mail address lists are considered property to go with the sale.
Spammers sometimes connect to a mail server and try and send to all possible common addresses in a particular domain. This is common for spammers sending to Hotmail or AOL addresses, since virtually any permutation of common user names will go to a real person in those domains.

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