You probably want to know how you got spam in your personal email account, wondering how did they find you? There are many ways the spammers and fraudsters can obtain this information into your email messages:
1) From online forums or newsgroups that you may participate in for the purpose of posting questions/comments on any number of topics.2) By using "spiders" to search the Internet. Spiders are programs that automatically retrieve web pages, repeatedly following links on one page to retrieve another page. These programs are called spiders because the "crawl" over the Web. Spiders visit web pages looking for e-mail addresses, which is relatively easy, since e-mail addresses contain the "@" symbol.
3) From online job sites where you may have posted your resume.
4) Bogus social networking. From online dating services; chat rooms that may require an e-mail address to participate; and AOL profiles or other "user profiles" that you may have created on the Internet
5) From accessing a shared, public computer that you used to access your e-mail account.
6) From the address books and e-mails on a friend's computer, this may have been compromised.
7) From "signing" the Guestbook on a website you may have visited and an e-mail petition using your name and e-mail address and then sending it to others, especially if there is a request to also send it to the originator of the petition.
8) Spammers use software to randomly generate e-mail addresses, especially for large Internet Service Providers (ISPs), in hopes of reaching legitimate addresses with their mailings.
