Why am I getting all this spam?

Ever wonder why or how you are getting spam emails? Read on to learn more.

Sending email is cheap, the costs are almost negligible to the email sender. Hence, it's cost effective for email spammers to send out hundreds of thousands of unwanted emails. However, the cost in lost of production due to spam was estimated at $50 billion in 2005. In 2005! Imagine what it is today!

Looking at your email inbox, you may wonder how did you get all these unwanted emails. What a pain and time suck to have to go through and make sure you delete and/or mark them as spam. Today, since most email providers give us a fairly well functioning spam folder, we still have to spend time going through the spam folder to mark legitimate mail as such.

If you think you have it bad, Bill Gates, Microsoft's founder, is stated to receive over 10,000 emails per day, mostly spam.

So where is most of this spam sent from, (un?)surprisingly, The United States. China, Russia and Brazil all are major senders too. When combined by continent, Asia is the biggest culprit.

Take a look at the dates of when you started receiving more spam than usual. Did you recently sign up for a website, app or newsletter? Did you provide your email address on Facebook or Twitter? Did you post your email up on a job board, forum or other public post?

If you did any of the above, it's quite possible that your email was harvested by a bot and stored in a database. These bots scour the web, scraping and saving email addresses as they come across them.

These databases of email addresses can then be sold to companies or organizations that are known to spam offers, products and other unwanted emails.

EmailOnDeck provides you with a temporary email address that you can use to protect yourself from spam. Any email sent to your temporary email will be automatically disposed of after a couple days.

So when you want to sign up on a site, post your email address on a public forum or any other high risk activity that could involve your email address being harvested by a bot, consider using a temp email address from EmailOnDeck.com

References to numbers and information in this article can be found here.

Stay safe out there.