Unwanted marketing messages (aka SPAM) are clogging up everyone’s inboxes, but have you ever stopped to wonder how on earth all those spammers have sourced your email address?

Hare are some ways they may have gotten your email address:

1. Entering Contests and Promotions

As annoying as it is, there are a few common ways that marketers legitimately come into possession of your contact information. One is when we enter online or offline promotions and contests, those tempting offers we have all seen for things such as cars, holidays and gift cards. On the surface, they seem like a fun chance to maybe win a prize, but before you enter, it pays to read the fine print.

In the fine print you will usually find terms stating the company reserves the right to share or trade your email address with affiliates and other third parties. So, by hoping for that dream prize, you have given inadvertently permission for your info to be sold to other parties. If they don’t sell your address they may use it for there own email advertising.

2. Publicly Displaying Your Email Address

Another gold mine for email addresses are websites, social media profiles, personal blogs, forums, comments sections and the like. Automated bots are constantly prowling the internet, collecting any unprotected contact info they find displayed online.

3. Data Breaches

No company or individual is immune from the threat of data breaches. When a huge repository of private user records are stolen, such as in the infamous breaches of LinkedIn, Yahoo and many others, cybercriminals are offered a massive, gift-wrapped list of email addresses all in one place. Check out Have I Been Pwned regularly to see if any of your online accounts were unintentionally caught up in one of these digital heists.

4. Engaging With Spam Messages

Astoundingly, even avoiding and deleting suspicious messages is not always enough to escape notice. Advanced tracking allows spammers to monitor whether an email address actively opens or engages with a particular promotional email in any way. Unfortunately, clicking unsubscribe links achieves the opposite goal by verifying to dodgy companies that the account is live and operational. Any interaction at all, even to get rid of the spam, tells dodgy marketers that your inbox is in active use and ready for more spam.

Prevention and Protection

Once your email address is out in the wild, you can’t easily get it back in the bottle. The best prevention tactics involve limiting what information you display online.

You can also track the sources of the leaks by adding a plus symbol and then the website name (i.e. [yourname]+

we*****@do****.com











) when providing your email to different sites and services. This helps identify the source of any future compromises and still works like your “normal” email address. Spam filters and security programs are also crucial defence layers against the spam deluge.

When All Else Fails

If you have exhausted other options and spam continues plaguing your inbox, let our technicians handle it from here. We can install robust commercial antispam filtering tailored to your specific email usage. Contact us today and, finally, read your emails in peace.