Q: How are spammers getting my email if I hardly ever use it? I don’t respond to any offers and I want to know whether there is a way to stop them!
A: Junk email continues to grow, no matter how carefully you conduct yourself online.
Your email address is the online equivalent of our home address or phone number. Once you give it to anyone, it’s impossible to control what will happen with it.
A common misconception about spam email messages is that we somehow have control over whether we get junk messages or not. But we don’t. It’s really no different than physical junk mail in your mailbox; despite our best efforts, it still shows up.
There are a number of ways that your email address can fall into the hands of spammers, but here are some common ones:
Someone you did business with has been breached
As soon as you provide any company with your email address, it will go into some sort of database. Even when the database is meant to be private and not intended for use as a marketing list, if the business becomes the victim of a breach, your information is now in the hands of the underworld.
Once one spammer has the address, it’s just a matter of time before your address propagates to other spammers’ lists.
A few websites can tell you if your address was part of a major breach — such as https://HaveIBeenPwned.com, https://PwnedList.com or https://BreachAlarm.com — but smaller breaches won’t appear on any of them.
You posted something online that included your email address
Spammers use email-harvesting bots to scan the Internet looking for valid email addresses.
If your address is posted on any website, whether it’s personal or for the company you work for, it’s in all kinds of spam lists. Any type of online activity (registering a domain, blogs, forums, social networks, etc.) that makes use of your email address could expose it.
You unsubscribed from a spam message
We’ve all seen the links in spam emails that claim that if you don’t want to receive any of these messages in the future, you can simply click on the unsubscribe button or reply with “unsubscribe” in the subject line. Often, the unsubscribe information is accompanied by “guaranteed unsubscribe” or verbiage that claims that they follow U.S. spam regulations.
The problem with unsubscribing from something you never subscribed to in the first place is that you may only be verifying your address to the bad guys. Remember — spammers don’t play by the rules. They’ll do whatever they can to validate your address, which they can then sell to others.
Your email program loaded an image
A really clever way spammers verify your address is by including a tracking image, which loads automatically for most users. As soon as your email program loads the image, the spammers are notified through their tracking system, and you’re on the list — most email programs have settings to block images until you say to download them.
Spam is a fact of online life, so avoiding what I’ve already outlined, along with using an email program with solid anti-spam technology (I like Gmail the best), is your best bet.
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Ken Colburn is the founder and CEO of Data Doctors Computer Services. Ask any tech question on his Facebook page or on Twitter.
