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You should never post your real email address to a forum, comments form or other webpage that's publicly accessible. If you do it will almost be certainly be harvested by spammers.
Some people try to get around this by "munging" their email address, that is, disguising the address so that only a human can understand it. A typical example of munging is bill(at)microsoft(dot)com.
Munging has become less effective as spammers harvesting robots have got smarter. Many can now decrypt the most common munging techniques such as the example above.
Another approach is to display your email address as a graphic like this:
As this is a picture not text, it's much harder for spammers to harvest but it can still be decoded using an OCR program that can convert the graphics to text.
However you can make it nearly impossible for OCR by using different fonts and colors like this:
When you use an image for your email address users will have to manually re-type it to their email client as it can't be copied. However that's a small price to pay for keeping your address away from spammers. Don't try to overcome this limitation by mapping the image of your email address to a Mailto link. That would directly expose your address to spammers and defeat the whole purpose of the exercise.
Converting you email to a graphic can be done easily and for free at several websites. One of the most impressive is http://www.hidetext.net.
It will not only convert email addresses to fancy font graphics but can convert whole slabs of text as well, You can download the resultant image or access it via a unique URL. To ensure privacy, you can also elect to have all traces of your converted text removed from their server.
It an impressive free service. The only downside is that not all email services are catered for. Still, even if your email provider is not included you can still convert your address to plain text without the fancy fonts.
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OK, slow down spammers by displaying email as a graphic - I use a screen reader for the blind and view this as just another obstacle. Won't the spammers just employ a human to harvest addresses for a penny each?
I think most spammers use automated software for most everything they do, employing a human to harvest addresses 1 at a time would not be feasible. I guess it's possible, just not probable.
Just a theory, I don't really know anything.
This is what I use lately.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/five-free-temporary-email-services-to-avoid...
I use this one:
http://www.soodonims.com/
and it's free...
Sanitylost in Montreal.
I have my own domain(s) and simply create a forwarder for each instance that requires an email address. I can track who/what is selling my address and not only can I kill the forwarder, thus terminating the spam, but I know who to avoid in the future.
I like your style.
john
The easiest way to avoid spamming, find out who is selling your address, etc. is to pay a mind-numbingly low $15 a year to register your own domain name and have it hosted at register4less.com. No I do not work for them, I only use them. You can then set up, for free, as many email aliases as you wish. If your real email address is
nobody@example.com
and you register
abcdef.com
you can then easily set up
google@abcdef.com
amazon@abcdef.com
techsupportalert@abcdef.com
woot@abcdef.com
donationcoder@abcdef.com
twitter@abcdef.com
myspace@abcdef.com
linkedin@abcdef.com
microsoft@abcdef.com
...
and have them all forward to your regular email, nobody@example.com
If you start getting spam, log into your account and delete that address. Done. If you don't want to even work that hard at it (it's hardly difficult) you could just set up five addresses one time, called whatever1, whatever2, whatever3, whatever4, and whatever5.
Use one for semi-trusted sites, another for sites you don't even want to register for but have to for some reason, another for sites you aren't sure of, maybe one for relatives & friends you'd rather not hear from. It's easy as pie to set up your Thunderbird filters this way too. If it's addressed to whatever4@abcdef.com, it's from Aunt Tillie, it's yet another 10 meg powerpoint attachment showing pictures of precious children doing precious things, and can go immediately into the Aunt Tillie folder to be read some day when you're really, really bored.
Don't pay money for this. You can make temporary email addresses for free at http://spamgourmet.com .
Once you set up your account, you don't have to enable individual addresses manually. You just follow the rules you set up and can make up new addresses on the spot. All the mail is redirected to your primary email address. These temporary addresses even automatically expire after a set number of messages have been sent through them (you can always increase the count later, of course, or even whitelist any particular sending address or domain.)
I set up a new webmail account once I found out about spamgourmet.com , and now I always know where my emails are coming from and I never get spams (at least not for long!), because I keep my real email address a secret.
For those of you who want the functionality described above by 2 Anons (deletable aliases, forwarding, knowledge of source of email/spam by the alias used) but do not wish to register a domain, use E4WARD.com for free. It is a well-respected, successful company and won't go out of business anytime soon (e4ward handles user messaging for craiglist, among others). For $10 more a year, a catchall feature is available. I've been using it with no problems for more than 4 years.
I've used E4ward, it's a good service but I mostly use Sneakemail; $2/month. Also I find it useful to create Gmail filters that look for Sneakemail's "|xyz|" string in the To: header and take actions on what type of mail it is.
With Sneakemail I've found 3 firms I've done business with that have later leaked my (sneakemail) address to spammers.
¿ sɹǝɯɯɐds ɯoɹɟ ɯoɔ.1ıɐɯǝ@ǝɯɐu sǝpıɥ ʇxǝʇ buıddı1ɟ ɟı ɹǝpuoʍ ı
Might, but I kinda doubt it... all it would take is a somewhat intelligent spambot that maps symbols to their real equivalents (i.e. one - 1 maps to L - l)...
http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html
I may be missing something obvious, but surely this approach can only really work with personal webspace (where you have control over the graphical elements) or, at a push, as an avatar in a forum?
I prefer throwaways (like Yahoo Addressguard) for this sort of thing.
If you use gmail and your address is name @gmail.com, then you can use name+microsft@gmail.com, name+amazon@gmail.com, name+anydodgywebsite@gmail.com etc. These will all flow through to your gmail address and will quickly show which sites are using your address incorrectly. These can then be easily filtered.
Spammers are not that dumb, they will just remove the +ANYTHING part from all emails.
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