Craigslist has become a very popular site over the years for buying and selling goods and services without having to fork over money for advertising fees. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this same service is being actively used by spammers for harvesting the site’s users’ email addresses. Here’s how it works.
In the first step of the process, an application specifically designed for this purpose is used to automatically retrieve the email addresses from each ad in the selected categories in the selected region. This will result in a list of thousands of email addresses.
I know what you’re thinking: “I always use that scrambling feature that creates a temporary forwarding address for me, so I’m safe.”
Wrong.
While the temporary forwarding address system enables you to keep your personal email account from your ad posts, it does not prevent you from giving your address to the spammers yourself. The second step of the process, you see, is automatically sending you an email which usually consists of just a couple of sentences, typically asking you if the “item” is still available. No phone number is given, so you quickly email them back to let them know it’s still available. Bam – your real email address has been harvested, and massive spamming can begin.
You might think that it would take a lot of effort to send people emails asking whether their items are “still available” or to ask them some other vague questions about their items. Fortunately for the spammers, there are software products which make this process automatic for them. They can use hundreds of Gmail accounts (I’ve seen Gmail a lot in particular) as senders, and the software generates the vague question on its own. Response emails are automatically used to record valid addresses.
My wife recently had to change her email address of 8+ years due to it being harvested through an ad she posted on Craigslist. I use the site every now and then and I never fail to receive these one-liners asking for confirmation, and then when I reply, there’s no response back.
I’m personally going to ignore all emails which do not specify alternate means of contact, i.e. a phone number. And I will mention this as I post the ad, because I have no interest in getting hundreds more spam emails each day about sex pills or fake Rolexes.
Mika Salakka is a Finn living in the United States. He is a nursing assistant, a creative writer, a devoted husband, and an observer of the human condition. His interests range from music and literature to psychology, sociology, medicine, technology, and spirituality.