SciD@T@, a company that services spammers.
There are companies that harvest and sell the directory information — including email addresses — of scientists, researchers, college and university faculty, and many others.
One of these companies is India-based SciD@T@. The company’s tag line is “Pharma Biotech Data Solutions,” and its motto is “a global biotech data provider.”
These phrases gild the company’s true mission, which is to collect and sell email addresses to companies that use spam email in their marketing.
They sell their email address both by field and by country. Clearly, many of the predatory publishers on my lists have been clients of this company or its competitors.
Is your field listed? The numbers indicate number of email addresses available for sale.
So, if you’ve ever wondered where someone got your email address, companies like this one may be the source.
There also many kinds of free and not free programmes available for harvesting email addresses from websites… these are essentially robots that can scan text and detect addresses. So it is always best to avoid putting your email address in a public place without some kind of disguise or foil…. the address in the form of a graphic image, or with the punctuation written in words. or use a secondary address for a special public purpose and set this up to forward to your main address. The secondary address can then be discarded when no longer needed, and will be of no use to spammers.
[...] One firm selling these addresses is SciData, which substitutes the “@” for “a” in its logo, indicating that email is @ the heart of their business. I won’t use that here because it’s just too visually annoying. Jeffrey Beall recently wrote about SciData on his Scholarly OA blog. [...]