in reference to a previous thread ( http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1519281 ) I would like to know how spammers are finding my Google e-mail address. Included in the list of spammers are the never ending list of Nigerian 419 scam artists, some of which have google e mail accounts and claim they found my e mail address on a google e mail directory ( which I am sure doesnt exist ). How are they finding me ?
Actually lot of web spiders (Bots) are not available to search for a specific phrase or word online. Here is how mostly those bots work. For any specific keyword, those bots will search using google (Some bots asks user to choose SE). In the results obtain, they will search all the webpages for @ symbol as there are no email address exist without @ symbol. Thats it, all the mail IDs are captured.
Maybe this is unrelated to your situation, but I had a similar question for myself. I'm betting that spam email lists that may have my old @juno.com email suffix, may just run a program that takes the prefixes from an entire list, and add them to @gmail, just to see which ones come back deliverable and undeliverable. Because a lot of people use the same prefix and have several email accounts, including hotmail and yahoo and others. Do you think that may be it?
Search your email in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Also make sure it's not in any code like your sites forms or in your web pages. Also they may be "scraping" it from whois queries. Failing that my guess is they are generating it with some sort of dictionary or word list at random. Like: aaron aaron1 aaron2 And appending @gmail.com on them all and spamming the lot and hoping for the best. I don't know much about email spam, but these are the logical ways i could see it happening.
If you are a webmaster and you need to put your contact information on your websites, never use mailto: always insert an image. Its so easy to create a small image with your email in minutes using just Paint.
Some softwares have been written by some programmers which are crawling the web all the time, and perhaps you may even notice them hitting your server sometimes, and they can harvest the email addresses people mention online.
If you've subscribed to a certain website than that could be the reason. I've seen plenty of sites sell their email database away to a big corporation for a certain amount of money.