Do You Know How an Email Spammer Reaches Your Email Address?

Email security is emerging as one of the greatest security challenges before Internet users. Innocent users assume that the information they exchange through emails is secure but, in fact, a password hacker or email spammer is observing the entire process closely to hack their email account. You would be surprised to know that every single email account is targeted by spammers irrespective of the precautions of security we take during the process. The most important question here is how these spammers or hackers get our email addresses and what we can do to hide email addresses. This blog discussed this problem in detail and give some insight to help you in protecting your email privacy. 

How do hackers get your email addresses?

 Leaked databases of email accounts

The biggest source for spammers to get the list of active email addresses is the leaked accounts databases. The incidents of password leaks happen quite frequently thus opening ways for password hacker to send spam to the addresses. Password hacker sends infections in the form of junk e-mail to the account and thus compromise the security of the user. 

Leak of email addresses is getting so common that even companies like Adobe, LinkedIn, Gawker, Yahoo!, and Snapchapt have become the victim of it in the last few years. The leaked databases are considered huge security threat because they usually reflect account names and passwords. Once they get information they download the database and, then add millions of email addresses to it. They consider these databases very useful as they know that majority of these emails are active.  

Most of the hackers use this method to find email addresses to act as a potential email spammer. Unfortunately, the victim doesn’t have much to protect themselves from an email hacker or password hacker. 

Through clicks or image loading in spam emails 

You become a victim of spamming by clicking on spam mails or images therefore you should avoid clicking on such links in the email. It is rather safe to click on the ‘Unsubscribe’ link provided in the email. Mails from reputed companies carry "Unsubscribe" link as they don’t want to spam their potential readers and thus prevent the complications of anti-spam laws. 

On the contrary, if you see an ‘Unsubscribe’ link or a ‘Buy Now’ link in the unprofessional looking emails then probably they will not remove you from the list. To your worse experience, you will start receiving more spams after you click the link because the spammers get to know that your account is active, and you are checking your e-mails.

The same rule applies for loading of images in case of spam email. For this reason, you are advised not to click the “Load Images” button otherwise the spammers will get an acknowledgement that you have opened the mail. In some emails, however, there is no image but there may be one-pixel tracking bug that helps the spammer to know that the user has loaded the image. Therefore, most of the email clients don’t allow for automatic loading of images. 

Web filtering to search plain-text addresses

Web filtering for plain-text addresses is another means employed by spammers for getting active email addresses. It is a kind of activity that is performed by search engines like Google, in a bid to find email addresses available on websites in plain-text. For example, a spammer may pick the email ID from a comment “Email me at Richards@abc.com.” After picking the address, the spammers would add it to their spam list. 

Buying list of email IDs

Buying list of email IDs is another tactic adopted by spammers for getting bulk addresses. So today for spammers there is no need to get the addresses themselves as it is already provided by unscrupulous people who provide the details in lieu of few dollars. Previously, these addresses were obtained in the form of CDs, and they are still available. The only thing is that such CDs are nowadays less sought because of the leaked databases of accounts. 

Apart from the above-mentioned spammers can get email addresses through some other ways as well. Malware and viruses can also harvest data related to addressbook for spammers. But the ways mentioned above are the most common. 

How to prevent email spamming

Now the question arises that how we can prevent a password hacker or an email spammer from stealing your IDs. As discussed above, you can’t do much about preventing spamming but by using certain precautions, you can mitigate the frequency of such incidents. 

The first thing that you should do is to avoid placing your email address on the web in plain-text format and develop a habit of not clicking on a link or attachment. Next, you should never go for loading an image in a junk e-mail.