I recently put my old Hotmail account on my phone, which I traditionally only checked a few times a year. I went from 1-2 spam emails every few months to several a day, after going through all the old ones and marking them as spam. How is this possible? I haven’t given this email out in years, and none of my monitoring services have flagged this email recently. It seems spammers somehow know this email is active again.
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Email can have images in them. These can be in the email itself, but they can also be links to images, and your email viewing program requests these images from the website. The website now knows that somebody requested the image. You could also embed arbitrary tracking information in this request (e.g. instead of someone requesting spam.com/image.jpg, they request spam.com/image.jpg?email=nurse-robot), to which the website will respond with the same static image, but record the additional tracking information.
This is generally done with an invisible image, also called a [tracking pixel](https://en.ryte.com/wiki/Tracking_Pixel). Many private email viewing programs will block all external image requests for this reason. This results in quite ugly emails, but it has the benefit that your email viewing patterns are more private.
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Similar to what UntangledQubit posted below,
We use an Adobe product for signing e-documents. We can see in Adobe when a recipient has viewed the agreement that is sent through email, I believe UntangledQubit is on the fucking money with tracking pixels.
One way is just getting email address lists. Your email is valuable for marketing and lists are available across the internet. Some companies protect your contact information, some lose it and it becomes publicly available, and others outright sell it (looking at you, Facebook). Bottom line is when you get added to a spam list, you’re there and it’s commonly shared. Spammers may also send test emails out common or predictable user accounts at major carriers (format user[at]provider.com) and record which accounts do not return an “invalid recipient” error for future spam campaigns, which is another way to forever exist on a list that gets passed around.
Marketing is simultaneously ruining and funding our “free” technology (even old bad tech like USPS).
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In addition to the tracking pixels mentioned by UntangledQubit, another possibility is automatic unsubscribe. I know Gmail helpfully tries to “unsubscribe” you from certain emails when you mark them as junk/unwanted, and this feature can be abused as a way to confirm the email address is active (and obviously spam it more rather than following their wishes). I’m not sure if [outlook.com](https://outlook.com) has similar functionality but your mail client might.
Tracking pixel. It’s a small image inside the email that they send. When you open the email, you access the image, which pings their server. It’s basically a heartbeat that tells them that you open the email. Do not click on spam emails. Basically all of them use tracking pixels.
look i know you don’t sell my email address but your servers could be hacked.
yeah but we don’t sell your emails to third parties. 🤷
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I used to work as the systems administrator for a medium-sized ISP that had its own mail server.
They really, truly, don’t give a flying fuck if your email address is active, if anyone actually reads the email there, or if it’s a spam trap.
They just carpet bomb the whole world. Spam is literally the exact opposite of market research. They have no idea what their target audience is (except maybe gullible dupes – which is why so much of it seems so dumb that nobody could fall for it – believe me, there are plenty of people *that* dumb), and they don’t care either. When you hear statistics about how something like 95% of all email is spam, it’s because most of it is going to addresses that don’t even exist. That’s how we know for certain that’s spam.
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