Protect Yourself from Spam

Unsolicited commercial email (spam) is a sad fact of life today. While there is no perfect solution that will keep your email mailbox clean, there are a number of simple steps you can take to minimize the problem.

Many spammers operate “bots” – which are autonomous software robots that “crawl” the Web looking for email addresses. If you post your email address publicly anywhere online (on a website, a discussion forum, in a guestbook etc.) then sooner or later it will be found by one of these bots and get added to a spam mailing list.

Here are some basic steps you can take to protect your email address:

• Don’t post your email address in “plain” form anywhere on the Web. Instead, you can disguise your email address by writing it in a convoluted way so that humans can still read it, but bots can’t. For example, instead of writing “john@example.com”, use “john AT example DOT com”.
• Sign up for a new email address to use when you need to supply an email address but don’t particularly care about the replies (e.g. when posting on a guestbook)
• Keep a “private” email address which you share only with close friends and family. Never use this private email address on any site.
• Obfuscate your email address before posting it on your website by using the email address encoding tool.
• Use a feedback form on your website instead of providing a contact email address.
• Choose a relatively long email address (8+ characters)
• Never sign up for an email address which is the same as your first name or last name (e.g. smith@hotmail.com). Instead, add your initials and some numbers (e.g. esmith77@hotmail.com)

Some spammers find email addresses by generating likely combinations using automated tools. For example, they may generate a list like aaaaa@hotmail.com, aaaab@hotmail.com, aaaac@hotmail.com and so on. They also make use of word lists and lists of first names and surnames to generate likely email addresses.

Of course, most of the email addresses generated automatically using these techniques won’t actually exist, but spammers don’t care since email is so cheap to send out.

On a website, there are a number of techniques that we use to hide your email address (the email address encoding tool is but one example) – you should never have your email address shown in full, plain text for spammers to grab.