Unfortunately, the answer is, very easily. Your work email, if it's posted on your company's Web site, is probably even more vulnerable than your personal address. Your personal email is likely to be culled from newsgroups, but savvy email marketers are more likely to troll company Web sites for email contacts.
For home use, you can change your email address, or simply get an alternative "spam catching" address from a free email service and use it when you post to newsgroups or fill out forms on the Web. But businesses can't have employees changing their email address every time the spam piles up. Nor would it be good business practice to remove employees' email addresses from the company Web site.
Relying on legislation to halve the size of your inbox has proved a waiting game, although plenty of legislatures are trying to whittle away at spam. In California, the unsolicited email I receive is required by law to have a label of "ADV" or "ADV:ADLT" in the subject line, only three of the last 50 spams I received were appropriately labelled. Obviously, email transcends state boundaries--much of it originates overseas--which makes such the legislation difficult to impose. In some cases, it's weak by design. If, for example, you live in Delaware and receive a spam email from out of state, your state's anti-spam law only applies if there's "a reasonable possibility" that the sender knows you are in Delaware. Just keep deleting.
Where it all starts
Perhaps the best explanation for the growing volume of spam comes from a spammer; a recently received email proclaims, "Email marketing is spreading around the whole world because of its high effectiveness, speed, and low cost." The first point--spam's effectiveness--might be hard to swallow, but the rest goes without saying.
Not only is it quick and cheap, but the targeting of business Web sites for email marketing campaigns is getting more sophisticated. And it's the employees who largely shoulder the burden of filtering spam, sapping company productivity.
A lot of email marketers get their start with courses and software from the likes of the Internet Marketing Centre. IMC encourages the people who take its courses to be responsible email marketers and avoid practices such as renting sloppily gathered email lists. But regardless of how well-targeted these email campaigns get, it's still a given that most of these emails will end up in the trash along with the Viagra sales pitch--only your employees will have to read more than just the message headers to determine that they're cold calls.
Ed Brooks, for one, knows about cold calling. Before launching his Internet marketing firm, Beyond the Site Marketing, he did just that for telephone services. Now he applies that experience to marketing products on the Internet.
First, Brooks uses specialised software that costs less than $100 to gather email addresses from Web sites. He types a search term into his application, which uses 36 search engines to gather URLs; then he determines how many levels he wants to go into the URLs. He can tell the software to exclude order pages, FAQ pages, etc., and to determine whether the search phrase is located in keywords or only in body text. Then he tells it what types of email addresses he wants to gather: "You can filter out customer service addresses, support (staff) addresses, things like that."
With returns of up to 1,000 Web pages per search engine, Brooks can generate a list of 36,000 Web pages.
