Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather email addresses from websites, newsgroups, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations.
This has led to the evolution of more sophisticated spambots that are able to recover email addresses from character strings that appear to be munged, or instead can render the text into a web browser and then scrape it for email addresses.
Alternative transparent techniques include displaying all or part of the email address on a web page as an image, a text logo shrunken to normal size using inline CSS, or as text with the order of characters jumbled, placed into readable order at display time using CSS.
Other spam messages are not meant to be read by humans, but are instead posted to increase the number of links to a particular website, to boost its search engine ranking.
Using methods such as security questions are also proven to be effective in curbing posts generated by spambots, as they are usually unable to answer it upon registering, also on various forums, consistent uploading of spam will also gain the person the title 'spambot'.