Every day, you see a flood of emails from multiple unknown and suspicious senders in your mailbox. They want to sell their products, offer their services, and even sent you scam emails that can trick you if you are not vigilant enough. So, you may wonder why you keep receiving these emails as you never disclose your email address to the outsiders. Here is a look at several ways they can obtain your email address without your knowledge.
These scanners will scan through thousands of websites or social media sites a day to obtain and compile the email addresses found in the websites. The alias, @, character is usually used by the scanners to identify email address within the websites.
There are companies that sell or leak the data including email address. These companies could be a small corporation or even a large and trusted company. Aside from getting sold, these data could possibly be stolen as well.
Through this attack, the spammers will attempt to obtain valid email addresses using brute-force attack. It is where, they will try guessing the username based on the common username used for email address by combining them or adding numbers to them. Receiving delivery failure status will determined that the emails are invalid.
There are fake services or fake newsletters which are created by the spammers to obtain the email addresses. This method can tricks you to willingly disclose your genuine email address as you thought that it is a real deal. Therefore, you may use another free email account to subscribe the services/newsletters if you are doubtful or the services/newsletters seem suspicious.
Sometimes, you may forget about the newsletters that you have truly subscribed. Then, you suddenly received an email to unsubscribe their newsletter which you thought a genuine email. With no hesitation, you click on the unsubscribe button or link. As a result, you are actually verifying that this is a valid email address to the spammers. So, the spammers would continue sending spam emails to your email address as they have confirmed your email address.
As most of the email viewers allow displaying the HTML content such as images, there is time when you may mistakenly click on this. Same concept as the ‘unsubscribe’ button/link, clicking on the HTML content will prove that your email address is viable. Then, the spammers will continue to send the spam emails to your email address.