HOWTO: Protect Your Email

[DarkDevil]

In my years of surfing the internet i've been hit by spam numourous times, going from one email address to the next trying to avoid it, and it seems impossible sometimes. As we know, there are 2 main ways that spamsenders get your email. You sign up for something, a newsletter perhaps, and they sell/trade your email address to the spammers, or, your email address is displayed on a website for numerous reasons (Its your portfolio, your a member on the website, etc.. etc.. general contact reasons.) and these things called Spam Crawlers go from one page to the next searching the code for email addresses. Well, as for the first method i can't really help you out much. Though, i can tell you to be careful with who you signup with. Perhaps if you only subscribe to one newsletter and your email has many different forms (for example my accesswave email address, [email protected], is also [email protected] [email protected], and [email protected] because its all the same company, or atleast it was back before eastlink bought them out.) then sign up for that news letter using one specific alternative for your email address.

Now, onto the reason i posted this. SpamCrawlers, or AddressCollectors, these things are horrible, they search the code for your address. and i've seen 3 different ways people avoid these.

1. Remove NOSPAM
Some people seem to think adding Remove or NOSPAM to the middle of their address works, ([email protected], [email protected], etc..) and although it seems like a good idea, this first emerged years ago and i'd think by now spam crawlers would have evolved to remove this remove or nospam tag within the email address. However, it still seems to be popular, so it must be doing something right.

2. Image
Some people in the past have actually put their email address on their website in the form of an image. No problems with that, except that visitors can't copy and paste the email address into their email program of choice. However, this is still a good idea. I have read that javascript can be used in conjuction with this to make the mailto link.

3. Javascript
Using javascript you can actually stop spamcrawlers from getting ahold of your email address. I think, i haven't tried this one, but in theroy it should work. Joe Mallers website.

4. Flash
Ok, so i said i had 3, but i thought of one while writing the image description. As we all know, flash is a very flashy program (no pun intended), it has all the bells and whistles when it comes to graphics. Well, besides filteres. So take advantage of the coding side of things. Make a little image, the size of your email address, and type it in, and within flash use the mailto feature when your email address is clicked. Compile it, and throw it onto your website. Since their is no way to actually grab the code of the flash without downloading and decompiling it, and since essentially a browser only points you to said file, the evil spam crawlers will only see it as a flash graphic.

Anyone else have any methods. Or comments?

EDIT: just realized while submitting that i should take one c out of access so that spam crawlers won't come across this list of all my email alias.

 

[adam_uk]

grrrr i think they should maek spam illegal

 

[bobbi]

I'm glad that you brought this up dark, because lastnight I was asking someone this very question. I keep getting e-mails with this address for an example([email protected]) <not just like that but well with all the jumbled letters, so ne way to the point, I don't use the e-mail address that I use for personal usage when I sign up for forums, and I have the option chosen not to share my e-mail address. So is it possible that like with the automatic form fillers, that people can get your e-mail address that way as well?

I agree, spam is more annoying than telemarketers they both should be illegal and should be punished to the fullest extent.

 

[DarkDevil]

I don't have much experiance with these automatic form fillers. Unless you mean gator. In which case, yes, the gator corporation steals your info through gator. Don't even try to agrue with me about the differ.

Personally, i don't do any of these things. But once i start working on my site i will be. The method i use is i sign up for things using my accesswave account, nickg(a)accesswave(dot)ca, and i use my eastlink account, nickg(a)hfx(d)eastlink(d)ca, for personal use. Although not many people know my personal one, this works because most forums only send you one thing, usually a confirmation email and then just store it in plain sight on the members page. But because i use my accesswave to loosely it gathers 25-50 spam a day, i've developed a good eye for scanning through subjects and deleting them at will.

 

[bobbi]

I have had many problems with gator myself. I was just curious if possibly automatic form fillers could steal e-mail addresses as well.

 

[DarkDevil]

I'm not sure, i haven't read much abou them. I'm not even sure what your refering to.

 

[deadserious]

One other way that your emails get added to spam lists is from actual people browsing websites looking for them. I know this happens as well. There's so many different ways that spammers can get a hold of your email address. Another one is companies selling them. And yet another is people going through whois information and gathering them.

If you just don't give your email out to anyone, except for those you want to have it, don't subscribe to anything, and make sure you read all the terms of service and privacy policies for all the things that you do sign up with that require your email and make sure they don't do any of the above then you should be safe for the most part. But that's not saying that it will protect you 100%.

Oh yea, just thought of another way that spammers may get your email address. You know when your friends have you in their address book and they get some email that they think everyone in their address book should have? They send it to everyone in their address book, and everyone that got it, sends it to everyone in their address book, and it just continues on and on. So it's very possible that one of the people that get the email is a spammer themselves or gathers the email addresses for the soul purpouse of selling them to spammers.

 

[bobbi]

Well it's annoying for sure when you check e-mail and half of it is spam mail, things such as "Earn Thousands by working at home", or those lovely, "how to make your manhood bigger" especially when your not even a guy. I guess when you get an e-mail address you should probably have two or three addresses so that you can at least use one for personal use.

 

[Alpha]

Ok here's what I do. I usually go to a free place such as Yahoo and sign up an account. Then I use that email for all networks, forums, and company forms I fill out and etc. And I could really care less about spam plus Yahoo has SOME anti-spam technology. That's one way that helps. Personally right now my personal email barely has anything but that's probably because I never even use it LOL. Anyway, the other thing is even though they act like you only get 4 megs or 2 megs or whatever that's actually a lot for email unless your a pack-rat

 

[Anthony]

The HiveMail Enkoder is also another option that works fairly well (for now).

As far as the Flash method goes, its probably the safest, but now there are Flash decomplier programs that can break apart your Flash, although I haven't heard of anyone going through that trouble to grab email addresses (for now).

 

[al1]

I should come out with a site for anti spam later.
I hate spam. Just after 1 day of posting my mail in a forum I got virus mail a week later i start receive spam mail. Hope god kill all spammers Hahahaha

 

[QBert]

spam has become illegal in aus

i think its somthing like up to 7 years in prison and some huge arse fines.

 

[Prosperous]

Another way to wind up on spam lists is by selling domains on forums that get indexed by search engine spiders (such as this forum). then the spam spiders 'read' the domain name listings on the search engine (or worse, directly on the forum) and put names plus '@' in from of it and presto, plenty of email addresses generated that wind up in the domain name's 'catch all' email account!
Because of this, I mostly list my names on forums this way:

.com names:
MyDomainOne
MyDomainTwo
MyDNThree

.biz names:
NiceBizNameThisOne
AnotherNiceOne
AndOnAndOnAndOn

Cheers!
Rob

(Of course, if a spam-crawler finds a list of recently reg'd domain names somewhere (through zone files, maybe), then your names may still wind up into one of their email address generating programs, resulting in spam... )


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