[zaitsev]

spam bots:

Spam bots, also known as email harvesters, email address harvesters, crawlers or spiders, are quite probably the single most insidious manner by which spammers collect the email addresses of innocent victims.

In brief, most websites have at least one email address viewable to the public, even if just as a contact address for information or enquiries. Many websites show many email addresses - not just their own, but also those of visitors to their sites. Examples of these include message boards, guest books, archives of e-zine discussion lists, and so forth.

It is not uncommon for websites to not publicly reveal an email address, yet for it to still be simply found in the HTML source code of a web page. Many "form mailing" types of CGI scripts, for example, put the reply address in the (not so) "hidden" fields in the HTML coding on a web page which calls the CGI script.

Spam bots are software used by spammers to automatically "crawl" the web, (and newsgroups, chat rooms, IRC, instant messager and other contact databases) and locate any and every email address they can find. They then record all these harvested email addresses into a database to be used for plying the evil trade of the spammer.

yes msn is the best one, all the others are too tacky