Ok, this is like a rumour which is floating around, my best mate read an article on Spammers and this is basically what he said how they work...

1. Firstly they ask other "Spammers" for a list of active E-Mail addresses.
2. They usually end up paying a couple of quid (or dollars) for them
3. If they can't get any (Very rare case) they then ask some kids or teenagers to do it for them they make ****** and other search engines "Crawl" the net, they serach for '@hotmail.com etc addresses and store them all in a text file.
4. Once the kids or whoever have some they then pay them (Obviously) and the one who can get the most and uptodate email gets an extra bonus.

So thats how I'm told Spammers work :-( We all Hate Spam! And the spammers always use SMTP servers to Spoof their Email :-(