New way that spy ware works?

I just had one of the strangest experiences ever. I was looking at a few websites, that sell some software I am considering purchasing. I never filled out any questionaires, or put my email address anywhere on any of the sites.

Now for the shocking part. I went to my inbox after looking around at the sites and imagine the surprise when I see that there are emails offering to sell many of the software titles that I was just looking at. Is spyware now logging your ip and linking it to your email? Has anyone ever had this happen?

P.S. First off I run adaware and spybot and secondly the software titles were not common ones that I recieve junk mail offers for.

Spybot and Adaware do not detect or prevent viruses and trojans. If you do not have a firewall running, it could have been installed in the background without you even knowing.

Web beacons could be a good explanation of that. They are very insidious little bots and as long as you did'nt deactivated them, no one knows how far they can spy on your web activity. I know Yahoo mail uses it, and perhaps Hotmail does too.

[edit on 1/2/06 by Echtelion]