Harvesting e-mail addresses
Harvesting email addresses really appeals to spammers who can easily buy or trade lists of e-mail addresses from other spammers. Another common way to gain access to lists of e-mail addresses is via software known as ‘harvesting bots’. This software crawls web pages looking for e-mail addresses from public data.
Email harvesting methods also include offering a product or service for free just as long as the users provide an e-mail address. Common offerings are jokes or information and advice pertaining to a specific topic.
Spam differs from direct marketing in that it doesn’t cost more to send to a larger audience than it does to send to smaller one. Because of this spammers don’t care to limit the amount of people they send, nor do they have to restrict their e-mail runs to only those who might be interested. A consequence of this is that many recipients receive e-mails in languages they couldn’t possible understand.
The internet is just one great bowl of cherries for spammers harvesting e-mail addresses and the list of methods they use is almost endless, even to using viruses which scan the victim’s disk drives for e-mail addresses and discover those which have never been exposed on the Web, the e-mail addresses are then returned via the bot-net virus they themselves have created.
Legalities
In Australia it is illegal according to the 2003 anti spam legislation and in the USA the “CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 [3] made it illegal to initiate e-mail to a recipient where the electronic mail address of the recipient was obtained.”
