Scammers will watch you enter your email address in public and add it to their spam list.Ĭan Scammers See That I Opened Their Email? It’s very easy to scrape sites like LinkedIn for your personal contact info. Spammers may have found your email address after a data breach. A spammer may have purchased a list of email addresses (legally or illegally) that had your email address on it.

Spammers often test out common email combinations, like firstname.lastname, until they get a valid result. It’s very easy for spammers to find your email address if you’ve ever posted it online publicly. There are a number of different ways that email spammers could have obtained your email address, including: When spam messages successfully bypass spam filters and reach your inbox, it’s because scammers were able to verify that your email address is valid (as in, it won’t bounce back messages as undeliverable). Why Did I Get a Spam Email? How Do Scammers Get My Email Address?