How did Spammers Get my Email Address?

By Jeandre de Beer

It seems that everybody receives spam emails – no matter how careful you are. How does spammers get our email addresses and is there anything we can do to hide ourselves from them?

The truth is – there is no fool proof way of preventing spam.

We will discuss a few steps to protect your email address the best we can.

But how do they get your address?

The easiest way for spammers to collect large lists of good, active email addresses is via leaked account databases. These leaks happen on a regular basis – this is even the case for large corporate companies.

Adobe, Yahoo, Sony and LinkedIn is just a few companies that have been attacked by hackers and had their databases stolen.

Spammers then use these leaked databases and add millions of email addresses to their email lists. They know that the majority of these email addresses should be active, so these databases are an excellent resource for them.

There is really not much you can do to protect yourself from a spammer getting your email address in this way.

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