[thelist] Capturing Anonymous Emails

Jay Blanchard jay.blanchard at niicommunications.com
Thu Apr 21 10:37:22 CDT 2005


[snip]
One of my colleagues claims on his soul that he visited a website one
day
and then started receiving email messages from that company's website.
Here's the catch... he didn't enter his email address anywhere on that
website.

How in the heck is that possible?
[/snip]

Did he register for anything at all?

Let's say that the web site tracks the domains from which visitors come.
Then it sends out a spider or other form of scraper and gets e-mail
addresses that are listed on the site. If he registered even only his
first name the data gathered by the spider can compare and perhaps find
a match. If not, the site in question may just send e-mail to everyone
at that domain.



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