Some of those might be drug spammers, some who send phishing attempts, and others who want to help you increase the size of certain body parts.īut none of it is related to where you’ve been or what you’ve looked at online. That list may have been sold to another spammer, and another, and another, and another, until your email address appears on several spammers’ lists. Some get more than others, but most do.Īt some point, your email address made it onto a list of email addresses used by a spammer. Simply having an email address is enough to start getting spam.Įventually, that’s likely to include scams, phishing attempts, ads for body-enhancement drugs, weight loss products, and, yes, porn. If you haven’t provided your information, they have no way to know who you are. (For the record, I do not.) And some or all of that might look like spam, including more porn spam.īut just surfing websites - and doing so with appropriate anti-malware precautions and common sense - doesn’t give them the information to email you at all. Some may even send what you’d consider to be porn spam.Įven worse, they might also give your email address to someone else, who will also start sending you email. I’m sure the porn industry has similar products - newsletters, subscription sites, discussion forums - each requiring an email address to gain access.Īnd yes, once you give them your email address, they will probably start sending you email. Of course, you may choose to do exactly that.įor example, you might sign up for my newsletter, and I’ll send it to you once a week. There’s no way for them to email you, unless … The same is true for porn sites or any other website. (And I do want to, which is why I ask you to sign up for my newsletter. You can view all the pages you want and I’ll have no idea who you are. They can’t send you email if they don’t have your email address.įor example, you don’t need to provide your email address to view what’s on Ask Leo!. When you visit a website - any website - the site gets a certain amount of information about you, but not your email address.
It implies nothing about your online behavior. Everyone eventually gets spam, regardless of what sites they visit, and it’s extremely common for some of that spam to be pornographic in nature. If you explicitly give a website your email address for any reason, then of course they can email you. Visiting a website does not give them the ability to send you email, spam or otherwise. Websites and email are completely unrelated.