Address Book Scraping

hie everyone,

I have recently heard about the spamming activity called address book scraping. I want to know what do you mean by address book scraping and how does spamming takes place in it ?

please give your ideas and suggestions........

Sigma Visual Technologies provides software that allows sites to scrap and spam your contacts (stored in your address book) and thereby tricking people into logging into their AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, in your name and further scraping their address book..... This activity is called address book scraping.

You may have received calls from someone say some consultancy or some person you may haven't given your phone number or any other contact details. They fetch up your contact details from the social networking websites like Facebook or Flixster you may have registered or probably your friends may have registered and added you in their address book. They actually scrap or spam the address book of the 'n' number of users to grow their contacts profile.

This is actually low level spamming which is probably legal.......