Everyone loves getting personal mail and no-one likes getting junk mail! IF you have an email address you've probably gotten more than a few unsolicited email or spam messages. You're probably asking, How do I reduce or stop this junk email? How did this happen to me?
There are two VERY quick ways to begin your own personal SPAM-flood. The first is to use your email address as part of your signature where you post to a forum, guest book or online message board. The second is to put your email on your business or personal website.
So how can I stop them from getting my email address? Step one, NEVER include your email address in ANY online posts. The spammers can find your online post at sites with a guest book, in an online forum or in a blog. When in doubt, don't, there's no other way around it.
Step two, resist the temptation to 'sign-up' for every online freebie that asks for your email address. Some of them will spam you themselves or sell your email address to any spammer willing to pay for it.
Step three, consider using a white-list email service that incorporates a challenge response system that requires a human confirmation before accepting email from the sender. This can be a high maintenance approach for you or at the very least, is not very customer friendly. In light of this, we don't recommend you do this if you're soliciting business through your web site.
Last, if you have a business or personal website, another very likely way for a SPAMMER to get your email address is to scan it from your website. The more popular the website, the more likely that exposed email addresses will be added to someone's SPAM list within a few days of coming online.
SPAMMers often use software automation (SPAM gathering robots called spambots) to scan email addresses from publicly available web sites.
As recently as late 2007, we were still promoting the use of an email obfuscator. Simply put, this free tool confused an email address in such a way that when that email address appeared online, the address would be human-readable, but behind the scenes it would be encoded. It appears that this method no longer confuses the spambots.
Although no method is going to absolutely stop the spambots, at SonFisher Web Studios we have taken an initiative to thwart the spambots as much as humanly possible. Our goal, is to knock-down the usefulness of all spambot's. If you would like a nearly bullet proof method to stop the SPAMmers from getting your email address(es), please contact us.
In the end, after you've changed the way you share your email address with others, consider changing it one last time. You might even consider having a 'throw away' email address to use when you just can't resist the occasional online freebie!
Keep the faith and keep fighting against the monster called SPAM!
[1] Obfuscate: to make so confused or opaque as to be difficult to perceive or understand: "A great effort was made... to obscure or obfuscate the truth" (Robert Conquest).