WARNING: Worm dupes with fake Microsoft address !

[WarBlade]

And I have Ad-Aware. And others. And I use them around once a week. And I run a software firewall. And I'm the only one who uses this computer. And it's password-protected to get into. :P

So, while that's a possibility for perhaps *another* case, this problem is all too common, and is pure spam. I haven't found a way to stop it other than by filters.

Ad aware is a start, but only tackles local files that act as a beacon. There are other ways your email address can get out there. Filters and common sense are good defences.

My question is: How do these things FIND these e-mail addresses to send the spam to if they're never advertised? I.e. my web-host e-mail address(es), or my ISP address. Are they selling my address somewhere?

Sometimes email address lists are shared by parties you'd rather not know about. There's not much you can do about that aside from being prudent in determining how much you release your address t the world. Then set the filters. ;)

Bots pretty much exactly like the google search engine also roam the net and collect email addresses from sites.

Any web page anywhere with your email address displayed is a potential threat. When I'm building a site for my own use I generally try to restrict contact email addresses to a single page and actually go a step further in encrypting that one page. The text on the document that people read, says Email me (or similar) rather than actually displaying the adress and also the meta tags/robots.txt holds information that prevents conforming bots from caching the page. Even all that is not foolproof

The very first day I had my ISP e-mail address, I was already getting spam. :P Methinks we've reached a new age: one where computers just put together random letters / numbers in the vain hope of finding an e-mail address. Given today's technology, it could work quite well. :P

True. I have recieved such emails in the past. A hidous list of random addresses CC'd to hundreds. The body of the mail contained a link to a page where you could 'unsubscribe' thus actually submitting your email address to a spammer.

Lamest of the lame. <_<