How to Avoid Spam (Part 6 of 10) - Disguise your email address on the web
Disguise your email address on the web
If you have to use your email addres on the web, such as for newsgroups, forums, chat, etc., you should disguise it. First choice is not to use an email address at all (see Part 1 of this article), second best is to use your throw-away email address (see Part 5 of this article), but if you really do want to share your email address with other people on the Internet, then you should make it harder for spammers to get it.
Spammers find a lot of their email addresses by using automated robots (spiders) to search web pages for things that look like email addresses. If I post something here like: notanemailaddress@invalid.com, then you can bet that in a very short time, that (nonexistent) email address will start receiving spam messages. The spammers don't even care that it's not a valid email address, it's almost as easy to send one spam email as a million. They can even find email addresses embedded in the web pages, like the Contact Me link I have at the bottom of every web page.
If you want other people to know your email address but not spiders, one common way is to write out parts of the email address so that it doesn't look like an email address, like: "drew AT hevle DOT com". If a real person reads that, they'll know to change the "AT" part to "@" and the "DOT" part to ".", and to remove the spaces. Click on this Contact Me link to see how I on my web page. You'll see that you have to do a little editing for the email address to work. I also tell people to email me at firstname.lastname at lastname.com. It takes a little more effort than just clicking on a link, but it's a small price to pay for no spam. A spider, unless it's pretty smart, won't recognize that phrase as an email address at all. Another way is to add something to your real address (like drewNOSPAM@hevle.com), and that way, if a human being has to contact me, they can, but the automated systems won't be able to figure it out. This has become fairly common, and I'm sure that the spammers have caught on to this little trick, but by varying it a little bit, drewNO@SPAMhevle.com or drewDELETE_THIS_BIT@hevle.com. Another good practice is if you have a smaller ISP or your own domain, to be sure to put some text in the domain name part (like drew@hevlePLEASE_DONT_SPAM_ME.com) so that the spammers don't find a new domain to start dictionary spamming (see Part 4 of this article).
Another method on a web page is to use an image instead of text, so the spider can't recognize the text, but someone reading it can, like this:
. You can also just use the image for part of the email address, like in this case, the @ symbol is an image instead of text:
drew
hevleNOSPAM.com. The spiders can't read the images, so they don't know that it is an email address.
See tomorrow's posting for Part 7 of How to Avoid Spam.
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If you have to use your email addres on the web, such as for newsgroups, forums, chat, etc., you should disguise it. First choice is not to use an email address at all (see Part 1 of this article), second best is to use your throw-away email address (see Part 5 of this article), but if you really do want to share your email address with other people on the Internet, then you should make it harder for spammers to get it.
Spammers find a lot of their email addresses by using automated robots (spiders) to search web pages for things that look like email addresses. If I post something here like: notanemailaddress@invalid.com, then you can bet that in a very short time, that (nonexistent) email address will start receiving spam messages. The spammers don't even care that it's not a valid email address, it's almost as easy to send one spam email as a million. They can even find email addresses embedded in the web pages, like the Contact Me link I have at the bottom of every web page.
If you want other people to know your email address but not spiders, one common way is to write out parts of the email address so that it doesn't look like an email address, like: "drew AT hevle DOT com". If a real person reads that, they'll know to change the "AT" part to "@" and the "DOT" part to ".", and to remove the spaces. Click on this Contact Me link to see how I on my web page. You'll see that you have to do a little editing for the email address to work. I also tell people to email me at firstname.lastname at lastname.com. It takes a little more effort than just clicking on a link, but it's a small price to pay for no spam. A spider, unless it's pretty smart, won't recognize that phrase as an email address at all. Another way is to add something to your real address (like drewNOSPAM@hevle.com), and that way, if a human being has to contact me, they can, but the automated systems won't be able to figure it out. This has become fairly common, and I'm sure that the spammers have caught on to this little trick, but by varying it a little bit, drewNO@SPAMhevle.com or drewDELETE_THIS_BIT@hevle.com. Another good practice is if you have a smaller ISP or your own domain, to be sure to put some text in the domain name part (like drew@hevlePLEASE_DONT_SPAM_ME.com) so that the spammers don't find a new domain to start dictionary spamming (see Part 4 of this article).
Another method on a web page is to use an image instead of text, so the spider can't recognize the text, but someone reading it can, like this:
. You can also just use the image for part of the email address, like in this case, the @ symbol is an image instead of text:drew
hevleNOSPAM.com. The spiders can't read the images, so they don't know that it is an email address.See tomorrow's posting for Part 7 of How to Avoid Spam.
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