Because it's hard to find developers and recruiters have the network?
They do not. Their "network" comes from scraping resumes from Monster and similar sites.
They store this database of resumes and addresses then send out a wave of emails for every next position they get, then process the replies from whoever replied to those mails and there you have your candidates.
I found that unsubscribing from those staffing firm mailing lists doesn't work but in some cases. In that regard UK agencies seem to be the worst of the bunch. Eventually I had to report those emails as spam and after a while the spam filter learned to catch those email automatically saving me the trouble.