Have you been wondering why you receive so many spam emails? If so, you may also want to know how to protect yourself from getting even more of it by learning how those spammers get your email address in the first place.

There are quite a few ways for spammers to get your email address, and to collect other information about you to use in their marketing campaigns. Many of them harvest email addresses from online forums and newsgroup archives, where unwary users post questions and answers with their real email address visible.

That trick is fairly well known now, and many users now munge their email addresses so the spammers email harvesting bots cannot read them. There are many methods of munging email addresses, and unfortunately the spambots know how to defeat some of them. The Wikipedia article linked in this paragraph has more information on which are more effective.

Spammers also want to know if you have opened their email to you, so they know who is actually receiving them and reading them, and employ different methods to determine this. One method is including "unsubscribe" links in the email which you can supposedly click, to opt out of receiving more mail from that source. This is a trick! Don't click that link, because they are not going to stop sending you email, and you have now just verified to them that your email address is valid.

Their methods have gotten more high tech however, and simply displaying the spam email in your email client often allows the spammer to know you did receive it. This is done by including elements in the email, that load from their web servers when you open the email, which logs the access to that element in their server logs, along with your ip address, and details about your email client.

This method is called a "web bug", and isn't limited to email, it occurs on web pages as well, where web sites may collaborate to track your movements on the web, collecting information used to target you with advertising, based on your browsing habits. One large example of this kind of tracking is the Facebook Web Beacon program.

I am actually using the web bug technique on this web site, to collect information about how many people visiting my site have javascript disabled. That is the only information I am using it to obtain however.

Many web sites now give you the ability to send interesting articles to a friend by entering that friend's email address in a form, and allowing the web site to send the article to your friend for you. You should avoid doing this, as you can just as easily use your email client to send the page yourself, or simply send your friends a link to the article. To learn why you shouldn't give your friend's email addresses to the web site, read the article Trojan Marketing

You can prevent a lot of this information collection activity by using a hosts file on your computer, which blocks your computer from accessing the web servers being used to track you. This is a simple text file with entries in it which state which domain names you do not want to load. It can be used to block ad servers, domains that serve up viruses and trojans, porn sites, or any other web site that you do not want to load on your computer.

You can get a pre-populated hosts file from many sites on the net, and I am using one which I obtained from a Microsoft MVP web site. Before you download and install a hosts file please read some additional important information about them on my Security Measures page, which explains that the file may block some things you actually want to see, and contains instructions specific to the use of a hosts file on a Linux system, as the MVP web site has instructions for Windows users only.

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