Why do people insist on opening mails from people they do not know or have never heard of?? Of course its a scam. I would do a scan on PC immediatley for spyware\virus. Do not mail anybody on your mail/friend list until you get all clear.
Sorry MrsV- got a bit emotional there.
Here is one of many reasons why you may get a spam mail:
THe fact that you have opened it may (more than likely) have opened a pandoras box for you now that they have struck gold.
Spambots can collect numerous e-mail addresses is to have a few guesses (well, more likely a few million guesses). What may happen is that an address will be guessed by taking well-known and well-used names together, then adding names of well-known e-mail providers at the end.
For example, let's say we have 4 popular men's names: Peter, James, John, and Paul. Now let's have 3 common surnames: Jones, Harris, and Smith.
It is easy to see that stringing these together with an underscore ("_"), a dot, or nothing will give quite a number of combinations. Examples include:
Using only these names and methods of connecting them, we can create 4 times 3 times 3 (i.e. 36) different possibilities. Add to that the permutations allowed by adding numbers, random (but likely) dates of birth, and the e-mail provider (Hotmail, Yahoo!, etc), and you can see how millions of e-mail addresses can be generated in no time at all. Many of these will not exist, however a substantial number are likely to be addresses that are in use. That's probably why you still get spam even if you don't post your e-mail address anywhere on the Web or sign up for anything online.
- peter_smith
- peter.smith
- petersmith
- james_smith
- john.jones
- john_smith
So is use of a bold purple font!spelling mistakes in an 'official' looking email are a guarantee of a scam
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