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Spammers are unscrupulous and will employ any means available to them to harvest addresses to use and sell. Many people must post their email addresses online. They may need to participate in newsgroups, have their address visible on a company webpage, or have their own website. If you belong to a chat room and have a visible address, you can almost guarantee getting spammed. The good news is that there are some further steps you can take to protect your address while on the internet and sending and receiving mail.
Secret addresses are, well, secret. The idea is not to simply remove your name from the "from" line of email that you send, but to keep the address and path invisible to spammers. Anonymous mailers are systems that allow you to send and receive mail using an anonymous account that you create. While each differs in the types of services being offered, they are basically disposable. You use the email address given by the anonymous account to post on websites or use while shopping at a particular retailer. All email that is sent to that account is forwarded on to your real, private address. If you need to reply, the anonymous server strips all private data from the email header and replaces it with its own preventing the origin of the letter from being seen. If you start to receive spam from that account, shut it down and set up a new one. Use each disposable account for a single purpose. That way you can tell where the spammers got your address from.
A great way to keep your email address safe from spammers is to "mung" it. The term seems to have come from the acronym "mash until no good" which basically means to make data useless. When munging your address, you are not making it useless to the people that are reading your posting or visiting your website. Instead, the data is being corrupted in such a way that the software that spammers use cannot harvest the address, or if they do, cannot use it. These programs, often called crawlers, robots, and spiders, look for any line with an @ sign and grab the corresponding data. To foil their attempts to add you to their list, simply change the way your address is shown by altering it. For example, if your address is jsmith@hello.com show it as jsmith(AT)hello(DOT)com. You can get creative, and probably should to prevent spammers from catching on too easily. Go with jsmith@hello.invalid or jsmith@hello-RemoveMe-.com. Always make the change to the right of the @ sign to prevent a valid ISP from having to deal wit
h spam being bounced at them in search of you. Then simply include instructions in your posting that explain to the group how to decode your address in order to reach you.
Unfortunately, spammers also employ programs that will attempt to retrieve your email address from your browser while visiting a particular website. These programs are just as malicious as any virus or worm and behave in a similar manner. They also do not discriminate content based on the type of site the address was harvested from. If a child visits a child oriented website, they are just as likely to receive pornographic spam as offers to refinance their mortgage. Always run at least the default security setting on browsers to prevent this from happening.
Finally, be creative in developing an email address. Spammers employ guesswork in their search to develop distribution lists. One ploy is to use usernames from valid email addresses and try them out on other ISPs. If your email address is test@msn.com there is probably a test@yahoo.com. The more common your email address is, the more likely you will end up on a spammer's list.
Found at spam-resources.info
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