> > Perhaps they just want to compile a list of live email addresses to sell to other spammers. To them, any click is a good click, because it gives them your address.
>
> This is actually not true. It's not normally possible for a remote web site to get your email address unless you give it to them. What they CAN get is what browser you use and what IP address you come from. IP address *might* be sufficient to track you down, but if you're a regular home user logged in through a home-user Internet Service Provider, it's only good enough to narrow you down to which ISP you use. Either way, that still doesn't narrow you down to an email address.

Except the way spammers work, I believe a lot of them send custom generated e-mails so that your message is different than the one everyone else gets. The links in the e-mail go to something like "www.iamaspammer.com/f329a1/" where the number is a key tied to the address that message was sent to. They already *have* your address, then, and this works as a sort of validation, as Howard noted. After all, the e-mail addresses of people who are 1) actually reading e-mail and 2) clicking on the links in spam, are worth more than others.

Stephen