Avoiding Spam - How Spammers Get Your Email Address
Avoiding Spam - How Spammers Get Your Email Address
By Mitch Bartlett
Educating yourself can help reduce
the chance that you will become
a victim of spam clogging up your mailbox. There are several methods
that
spammers use to obtain email addresses.
1. Filling Out Forms
Obviously, if you provide your email address on a form you are filling
out,
you re giving that address to somebody that may sell it to another
individual or
company. Most people provide their email address information for
something free
in return or a membership to a web site. You will have to read a web
sites
privacy policy to see what they are really doing with the addresses
they obtain,
but sometimes you still can t be sure to trust providing your address.
I always suggest having a separate email address just for these types
of
things. Open up an email address with one of the many free email
providers and
use that address every time you need to have a valid email address for
free
offers and site memberships.
2. Having Your Email Address Posted on a Web Site
If you post on message boards or even have your email address on your
own web
site as a way of having people contact you, it can open you up to spam.
Spammers
have robots that crawl the internet that seek out anything that
resembles an
email address.
If you have a link to your email address posted on any web site, it
will most
likely be added to a spammers email database at some point. If you post
on the
internet, try to post where your email address or a link to it isn t
displayed.
The site may have an option to enable or disable this feature. On your
own site,
use forms that users can submit that can be forwarded to your email
address.
3. Posting on Newsgroups
Like message boards and web sites, newsgroups are filled with email
addresses
for spammers to use. Newsgroups are searched as well. If you post on
newsgroups,
make sure you use a fake email address for people to reply to or
rewrite your
email address in your newsgroup software to something similar to your
original
address. If your email address is username@domain.com then change your
newsgroup
software to have your replies go to username –at– domain.com, or
another
variation of that. You can leave a note at the bottom of your messages
to change
the –at– to an @ symbol. This way only a human will be able to see
what your
email address really is.
4. Simple Email Addresses
Instead of searching for valid email addresses, some spammers just
broadcast
email to combinations of usernames that are common. For example, if a
company
has an email system that gives its users email addresses with a first
initial
and last name. John Smith would have an email address of
jsmith@company.com.
Spammers send email out to common last name using every initial
possible. They
could send to asmith@company.com, bsmith@company.com,
csmith@company.com, and so
on.
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Hotmail.com,
msn.com and so on.
Try making your email address a little more complex than first initial
and
last name, or even first name last initial. Try using your full name,
and if you
don t mind, even include your middle name.john_smith@company.com and
john.m.smith@company.com is a little bit harder for spammers to find
than
jsmith@company.com.
5. Reading Untrusted Email
Some email messages could have code within them that sends a
notification
that your email address is valid. Therefore, just opening an email
message can
cause a deluge of more spam to be sent your way. Use your best judgment
when
opening email. If you don t know where a certain email came from, just
delete
it.
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