# HOW did these spammers find my e-mail?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
**Created:** [July 15, 2005, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719 "2005-07-15T21:16:58Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2005, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719/1 "2005-07-15T21:16:58Z")
I’m not mad enough for a Pit thread, but suddenly I’m getting spam at my gmail address! And I was super-careful not to sign up for anything silly, nor buy anything through it, nor give it to anyone less than trustworthy. So how did they get it? Grrrrrr.
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### Author:  [@Reeder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reeder)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2005, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719/2 "2005-07-15T21:42:37Z")
Do you have it on a web page or a profile somewhere? There are such things as spiders that search out email addy’s.
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### Author:  [@bouv](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bouv)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2005, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719/3 "2005-07-15T21:46:55Z")
email phishing. They know that many people have gmail addresses, so bots just put together millions upon millions of word/number/letter combinations.
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### Author:  [@Futile\_Gesture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Futile_Gesture)
#### Post date: [July 15, 2005, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719/4 "2005-07-15T21:58:28Z")
Or someone you’ve emailed, or who has emailed you, has let their computer get infected by something that has stripped their system (or to be more specific; Outlook, usually) of every address it can find there.
Chain letters/circulars are the worst for this. They’re like mobile treasure troves of addresses, gathering more and more with every forward, just waiting to land on some dolt’s computer that’s infected.
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### Author:  [@Tastes\_of\_Chocolate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tastes_of_Chocolate)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2005, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719/5 "2005-07-16T01:15:30Z")
I’m voting for hte phishing bots. My SO and I have our own domain name, and for a while we had a catchall account, which collected any emails sent to our domain, but not one of the established addresses.
2 people, we rarely signed up using that domain name. We used to get a couple hundred 'catchall" emails a day. Not misspelllings. Just phishers randomly trying out addresses, hoping they found a good one.
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### Author:  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)
#### Post date: [July 16, 2005, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-did-these-spammers-find-my-e-mail/312719/6 "2005-07-16T01:48:42Z")
This is the thing about spam that confounds me.
How come such underhanded lowlife uneducated scum can sell anything when clearly they are so untrustworthy? Anyone using the lying cheating sneaky tactics that they emply can’t be anything less than scam artists. It’s an absurdity that spamming makes anyone any money at all.