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Message: <blockquote data-quote="HoLeChit" data-source="post: 4185935" data-attributes="member: 35036">I honestly would not be surprised, but I also doubt it. Using a tool called a web scraper (you can get them free if you run linux) you can "scrape" a website and get every email address included within the site, exported to a tidy excel spreadsheet for you to compile into a nice list. Takes about 30 minutes to learn if you're slow like me. So any emails put out in the clear (like classifieds ads) are ripe for the taking. Go do that to every gun forum you can find and I bet you could compile a couple tens of thousands of emails to sell to an advertising agency or company looking for firearms related leads. Might have to throw a few more trick in there, but that's roughly how it goes. With a little knowhow, you could automate the entire process. Also, if you use your username for your email handle, which many people do, you also leave yourself vulnerable. Sometimes people will take a list of usernames, feed them through a program that adds popular email domains to them such  as @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @aol.com, @msn.com, protonmail, zoho, and outlook will get you a ton of hits. Those email providers/domains listed above cover about 4 billion of the worlds email users. These junk mailers and such simply cast a very very large net.</blockquote>