You may wonder how scammers and spammers get your email address.

They have a variety of means – from searching official records to scanning social media posts to simply making them up and then seeing if anyone responds to emails at those addresses.

One method commonly used is scanning websites looking for email addresses, making them into lists and selling them to other scammers and spammers.

One such set of tools are called Email Scrapers or Email Extractors.

A recent message from one operation selling this kind of software tells me:

• Our software will enable you to scrape and extract business contact details into an EXCEL spreadsheet
• It’s like having a thousand data entry clerks creating information for you
• Cut your costs in these difficult times

It isn’t illegal to copy email addresses from  websites but it is illegal to send marketing messages to anyone who hasn’t given permission for that.

These services claim to capture only business email addresses but that’s a straightforward lie. The software finds any email address on the searched pages and does not care what is a business address and what isn’t

If you buy these spam lists from such operations, you will end up with a mix of business and personal email addresses plus fake email addresses and dead email addresses.

Plus, sending messages to those addresses is illegal.

Do not do it – it will simply make the recipients hate you for the spammer you are.

If you have any experiences with these scams do let me know, by email.