There's a whole lot of hacking goin' on..

http://majorgeeks.com/story.php?id=34540

 

Yup Diamond the spammers are getting back upto speed of late as its much easier as that story TimW linked to states they are trying to fool folk with real looking but bogus information to gain your bank details etc, this is much easier than breaking into your house as some folk sadly are caught out by these exploits.

Gmail and Yahoo as well as any email service are all doing great jobs in removing spam, they have very good huristics and blacklists to narrow the amount of spam you get these days, so if its in your spam box then the service has done its job.

However if you dont post your email online then a bot cannot find and save it into a spam list, however the routes that tend to be used are malware and in the malware route what happens is if a you or a friend is infected with such malware that grabs the email address book then they have your email address.

The other is pure guesswork in automatically generating an email address (tend to guess at real names or combinations of) and sending out the spam email to that address in the hope of someone replying. The method commonly used is sending you what may look like a real email from a company and having a "if you do not wish to recieve email from us use the Un-subscribe link below" then when you click this and email them to un-sunscribe they have your email.


Some good basic tips HERE