If you have an email address, you’ve received spam. This is just a fact of life. Any time you open up your inbox, more than likely some of the messages you receive are going to be junk. The real question is—why is there so much of it? What do the spammers get out of sending all this junk email?
Before we answer that question, let’s talk about how spammers get your email in the first place. Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy. There are quite a few ways spammers can get their hands on your email address.
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How Did They Get My Email?
First, there are large lists of published email addresses that are just floating around the internet. All spammers have to do is download them and start sending.
Odds are, though, your email address will be found by the small programs that crawl websites and forums looking for email addresses. These tiny programs will just search for the pattern of some text, followed by the @ symbol and then a common extension like .com or .net. If the pattern is recognized, the program will record it and move on.
There are other ways for spammers to get your email that may not even require leaving it somewhere on the internet. For example, if you or someone you know gets infected with certain malware, the virus will check the computer for your address book, record it, and then phone home any of that information. This could cause the amount of spam you receive to spike overnight!
This type of leak isn’t confined to just individuals either. Large companies sometimes get hacked and their email lists are then sold on the black market to be used as targets for spam.
See also: Is Spam Illegal?
Sadly, any time you give your email address out to any website, person, or company, you’re at risk for having it used for spam. Sometimes, websites and companies will even sell their users’ email addresses directly to spammers, which is the worst!
Once, I was at a conference where in order to enter a drawing, I had to give them a business card. Even though that conference was almost 5 years ago, I still receive tons of junk email from that.
The last way that your email is compromised, comes down to sheer odds. Spammers will often try popular email combinations, using popular names and services, and just see what happens. For example, a spammer might try and send an email out to eric@gmail.com. Odds are, this email is taken, and might still be in use.
So if you have a popular name or an email address that combines your first and last name followed by a well-known email service such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook you may be susceptible to receiving spam.
Why Do Spammers Spam?
This leads us back to why do spammers spam. It all comes down to numbers.
Say you’re selling something online. If you send an email out to everyone you know, odds are a few people would buy it. Say you sold 1 widget for every 100 people you sent an email to. If your product was $10, you just made $10 for doing next to nothing.
Now, 1 sale for every 100 emails is pretty good, but you’re only sending emails to people you know. Let’s suppose you could get 1 sale by sending 1,000 emails to strangers. The effort to send 1,000 emails is not much more than sending to 100—in fact sending 100,000 emails isn’t even that hard. So, if you sent out 100,000 emails and only 1 person purchases a widget for every 1,000, you would stand to make $1,000 just for sending a single email!
This is the same process scammers use when they pose as a Nigerian Prince and send out an email soliciting your help. If you comply, you will be rewarded with millions—but only if you send a $1,000 ransom first. The spammers don’t think everyone will fall for the scam—not by a long shot—but if they get just one person to send money, it is well worth the effort, economically speaking.
See also: 8 Common Scams to Avoid
Some of the recent hacks of major companies make this process even more dastardly. If you were one of the Anthem insurance customers whose information was stolen, you could be vulnerable to any number of scammers posing as Anthem looking for your financial information.
In addition to possible scams, those leaked emails could also pose as possible leads for Anthem’s competitors, for companies hoping to sell identity theft protection, or any other targeted service. This means even more spam and more sharing of your email address—all in the hopes that you’ll buy something.
Recently, there has been an even darker side to spam—distributing malware. Sometimes the goal of a spam email is not to sell you something, but rather to entice you to click a link to infect your computer with malware. The malware could then spread to the rest of your system and wreak havoc. It's even worse when the malware forces a victim’s computer to send mass emails, making the infected person an unknown spewer of spam!
Fortunately, there are some pretty easy tactics for avoiding spam email that I’ll cover in next week’s episode.
Well, that’s it for today! Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at quickanddirtytips.com/tech-talker. If you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on Facebook.com/QDTtechtalker.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
Email Hacker and Spam Inbox images courtesy of Shutterstock.