What sources do spammers use to get email addresses?

Posted by Andrew Grimm on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Andrew Grimm
Published on 2011-03-06T00:11:21Z Indexed on 2011/03/06 0:12 UTC
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From what sources do email spammers get their addresses?

Wikipedia mentions the following:

  • Harvesting email addresses from publicly available sources.
    • This includes web pages (web crawling), usenet posts, mailing list archives, DNS and WHOIS records
  • Guessing email addresses (directory harvest attack)
  • Asking people for their emails for one purpose, such as jokes of the day, and selling the email addresses elsewhere
  • Getting access to people's address books (which Quechup utilized)
  • Scanning an infected computer for email addresses.

Are there any other techniques used? Are any of the techniques above now obsolete?

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