avoiding junk mail

There are many automated programs in the internet trying to read people's e-mail addresses from their websites and then fill their mailboxes with tons of junk mail. Here I will discuss some of my methods and ideas against spam and spammers.

tools of spammers

Most people believe that they have given or written their e-mail address unintentionally to the spammer when they start to receive the junk mail. In most cases this is not true. Nowadays there are two main methods that spammers are using. First one is to use automated program that randomly sends e-mail messages to randomly generated addresses. Though this method sends a lot of messages to addresses that don't exist it also succeeds to find active ones.

The second and the most effective method to find valid e-mail addresses is to use spiders. These automated programs seek through the internet and find written e-mail addresses from websites. Some companies are actively developing these programs and the newest versions can figure out even some advanced protection scripts used by webmasters. Today the spiders are the most common junk mail agents on the markets.

disabling spiders

The only way to avoid spiders from detecting your address is to not to have it written in anywhere in the internet.

First of all you should use some free and easily expendable e-mail box for subscribing to mailing lists and other service providers that might expose your address in their website. Most of the mail boxes provide mail forwarding to another address so you don't have to check the secondary mail box every day. Just get rid of it if it fills with tons of spam.

If you need to tell your e-mail address in your website you can use my new technique. Draw an image that contains your e-mail. Then put a link to the image that does not contain your real email address. This way a human reader can see your address and copy it to ones mailing program but no automated program can find it.

Example:

Tapani Talvitie
20.8.2003

© Copyright by Tapani Talvitie 2003-2007, Last modified 28.3.2007