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Microsoft Security

How do spammers get my email address?

There are several common ways that spammers can get your email address:

It pays to keep your email address as private as possible, but sometimes it seems like there’s nothing you can do to keep it out of the hands of spammers. For this reason you have to combine smart privacy practices with strong email filters.

All of the most recent versions of Microsoft’s email services (including Hotmail) use a strong filter called SmartScreen.