There are programs that roam the Internet plucking e-mail addresses listed on Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, customer directories on AOL and Compuserve and any of the interactive forums on Salon magazine or The New York Times , for example. This means the more you leave your name on the Internet, the more vulnerable you are.
Harvesters are hungry.
They'll scavenge any e-mail addresses they can find, not caring whether they are old or obsolete. It doesn't cost much more to send a million spams than it does to send 100,000. But according to Junkbusters, a consumer advocacy group that started out fighting printed junk mail and has now taken on spam, there are things you can do. One sure way to guarantee you'll get more junk mail is to ask to be removed from a spammer's mailing list. Spammers use the shotgun approach to direct marketing and expect most of the e-mail addresses to be wrong.