How do the spammers know my contacts names??

[KParker]

This is not an urgent issue, but one of curiousity. I been noticing more and more that the sender line in a lot of the junk email I've been getting has had the names of people in my address book. At first I thought it was just a coincidence, but now I'm not so sure. Is this some kind of sniffer looking at my email? Really, I'm not paranoid about this, I just want to know what the deal is on this one.

Kathy

[doubledragon5]

Their called hackers. If you use a web based e-mail its more easier for them to send you spam than if you using sometining like outlook express.

Best thing to do is when you get this type of mail make sure you use the option( depending on what mail you use ) and block the sender this way when they try to send you mail it won't even get to you inbox. If you do use outlook express Go>Messages and choose Block sender.

[morriswindgate]

Do you have Cute Picture slide shows that play on your desktop, does a cute little gorilla or bird say hi when your computer starts up, no longer do you have to fill out pesky forms when you shop on the internet thanks to that free download, has you internet connection been maximized thanks to theat pop-up that told you it was running slow, instead of that plain old arrow, is your mouse cursor a bee or bunch of flowers, Does your computers clock now automatically update to the correct time thanks to that free download you saw in the pop-up, do you have cute little animated animals running across the screen along with a bunch of handy new buttons in you IE toolbar, did you download a handy little search assistant that finds everything on the internet for you, do you play games on the internet where you signed up to win big money, or do you find wonderful and useful programs that are free to install from several download sites such as TUcows?
Well if you do and the people in your address book find out, they will probably want to kill you or take your computer away from you. Because they are getting just as tired of the spam asa you are.

[KParker]

I do have web based email; Yahoo. I do notice this is the worst offender when it comes to the names from my address book.
I am very aware of spyware also. I run AdAware frequently to rid my computer of the junk, but I am not the only one to use this machine. I did find Gator on my computer recently, and I did not download that. I do remember seeing a click ad for it, and I may have unintentionally clicked on the wrong thing.
But you did bring to mind my lovely teenage nieces, morriswindgate. They are famous for downloading all of those freebies, and sending along chain email. They have gotten better, as all of the family has said to stop it. But I have seen them pass along an urban legend or two to about 60 people or so, and as I see my name being passed around on this long list I wonder sometimes where my email address will end up!
Oh well. Thanks for the info, both of you. It's helped me to understand some of the ways of the web.
Kathy

[doubledragon5]

If your worried about where your e-mail address has gone, I would (and have done this myself) change your e-maill address, and make sure you secure it with a password so noone but you can access your mail. Also I would let my nieces, know about it if they were using my address to send mail without my permission.

[Morpheus]

The other thing with the junk mail is that normally they have a link for "unsubscribing" if u no longer wish to receive offers. I dunno of any other option (....yet) but Clicking on this link will send an email to some database server somewhere and update it. This email contains ur name at the header section of the email and all the database does is simply extract it.

In most cases, its not just one database u r unsubscribing from, these spammers have affiliates so unsubscribing from one spammer will automatically subscribes u to the next spammer and so on.