Preserved Topic: Spam.. and spam bots

Hey.. I've tried to do some research on this topic but havent gome up with much, do Spammers get there email address by haveing bots trawl the web for pages with "mailto:" commands and catching the email address that way or do they do it some other way?

Some can do it that way (this is why some people post their email addresses as things like "bob@REMOVEhostnameTHIS.com")

Alternatively, some spammers will make scripts or programs to send out emails by the billions to random email addresses like bob1@hotmail.com, bob2, bob, etc etc, and then they see which email addresses bounce back messages (indicating that there is no such email address)

I'm sure they have other methods, but these are the most familiar to me.

I get spam from having a domain, I get tons of emails sent to random names like contact,admin,webmaster,post,info @icklepix.com.

I get spam from signing guestbooks, I know this as I used similar to this: fromjimsguestbook@icklepix.com so I know where my spam comes from, same deal with companies, I remember getting spam from yahoo@icklepix.com as far as I can remember.

Posting your url/email on the ICQ database will guarantee you spam too(shit loads).

Thats three ways to get emails, icq DB, random names as Xei mentioned, web pages and then theres the whole buying and selling of good lists etc.. companies will sell your email address if they haven't specified they won't.

Basically .. what would you do if you wanted someones email address ? Lets say mine, you can go to my homepage or check my profile.. computers can do this too.

Ok..and another question..
how long can an email be? I mean
how long can each bit be? I know the majorty of tld's are either 3 or 4 charcters
but.. what about the username and the host?

Trigger

Anyone?

well, domains are limited to 63 characters per level... so a 2nd level domain like ozoneasylum.com can only have 63 characters before the '.'. I'm not sure there's a limit to the subdomains, though, except that someweb servers limits get requests to some 4096 characters.

As for the user part: I have no idea.

I was just wondering because im trying to create random web address and was wondering how many chars high I could go in an attempt ot make as many 'fake' ones as possible with a minimum of real ones

Trigger