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I know this isn't strictly computer-related, but I think it's a problem that many of us face, and so I thought this would be the better place to ask it.
I'm just wondering about how spam is eerily accurate when it comes to the subject matter of the spam emails. It seems like whenever I find something new to obsess about (be it a program or whatever), I seem to always get spam emails related to that very subject. For example, at one point I was very excited because I was getting the Adobe Creative Suite, and all of a sudden I started getting lots of spam emails advertising Adobe products. How did the spammers find this out? Lately, I've been doing a lot of college searching (I'm a senior in high school), and again, I've been getting spam emails pretending to be college invites. It's not a big deal, because I've never had a spam email fall into my inbox after switching to Gmail, but it's just kind of creepy because it seems like they know my every move.
How do they know what I'm up to? And I guess the more important question: How can I keep spammers from tracking me?
+1 for the forum theory, that's definitely a possibility. I used to participate in a lot of forums and this definitely could have happened. – Sasha Chedygov – 2009-08-28T20:18:07.190
It certainly used to be the case that they used to harvest usenet posts for addresses so it seems quite likely they would now use forums although these tend to make your email address less visisble. – Col – 2009-08-28T21:22:10.353
I have 2 email addresses that I use; both of them are gmail accounts. I use one of them only with my close friends and for my iTunes account. I never receive spam there; the reason is simple: the spammers have never seen my email address anywhere, I've never registered on any site with it and it's not on mailing lists. – alex – 2009-08-29T09:36:27.460
@alex: I used to do that, but ever since I switched to Gmail I have not had a single spam email get into my inbox. It's not a problem anymore, I was just curious. – Sasha Chedygov – 2009-12-01T05:56:11.803