That Nasty
Little
Avoiding Spam
Spam is far more of a problem than a simple nuisance. Harvesting
robots (also known as spambots) actually exist with the sole
purpose of collecting/harvesting email addresses from websites.
How do the spambots find an email address? That Nasty Little
 .
The robots have nothing better than to spend 24/7 looking for
listings, and there is That Nasty Little
screaming, "Find me, find me!"
If there were no
signs in email addresses, the address wouldn’t be found.
If you have your email address on the
Internet, you will get spam. No doubt, no question about it, no
hiding from this fact...it's only a matter of time before some
spammer's robot scours your address from wherever it appears
online. Spammers employ many methods of address collection, from
the brute force to the sophisticated--everything from bogus
"enter your email address here for _____" (many sites will
dangle something in front of your nose for the price of a valid
email address; many more will ask for it before allowing you to
download software) to programs that travel through links on your
website collecting email addresses as they go. The key to
beating the spammers, is to make sure your address including the
Nasty
NEVER
appears on the Internet.
Spammers get you from your
Website!
You want to make your email address available on your Web pages
so that people who read your pages can get in touch with you.
However, you should know that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission
performed a study that showed 86% of new email addresses posted
to Web pages began receiving spam within six weeks of being
posted. The FTC recommends "cloaking" your email address. This
makes the address invisible to spammers' harvesting
robots while being as useful to humans as a standard mailto:
link using an
.
Making your Email Address Invisible on Your Website
It is best to put your email address on
the Web, but make it invisible. Well, not exactly invisible,
because that would defeat the purpose of putting the address on
your Web pages. What we need is a way to make your address
invisible to robot address harvesters while remaining very
visible to humans. This is done in two steps:
1) Create a graphical image of your email address and paste it
onto your Web pages. This allows your readers to view your
email address, but hides it from the spambots.
2) Cloak your email address
the
sign. This is done in the
background of your website within the source code. What your
customers will see is something like:
eMail Us.
When they click on that hyperlink, an email will open addressed
to you.
Please realize, creating a graphical image
that links directly to your actual email address, will not solve
the problem. The public may not be able to see the
,
but the spambots can!
Contact Us
for Web cloaking assistance.
●Newsgroups:
The Spammer's Breadwinner
For this I will start with a brief
history. Back in the 'Good Old Days' people posted to
newsgroups. That's it. Just posted. Their return address would
be in the message headers just like a regular email, and to
reply you'd just hit the "Reply" key in your newsreader and send
a response to either the newsgroup or the poster's inbox. The
Internet was an informational medium...not the interactive
commercial it is today. The growth of the Internet and its
increasing popularity sparked various entrepreneurs, seeing the
Internet's potential as a tool for making money, and its
commercialization began. Somewhere along the line, the spammer
was born.
The spammer eked out his living by programming computers to read
the headers of newsgroup postings and collecting the addresses
into a large file. The file was then used as the recipient list
of commercial emailing or sold to other spammers to increase
their lists. Newsgroup posters, becoming aware of the
harvesters, began leaving out or forging the sending address of
their news messages, and including their real address at the
bottom of the message (spammers of the time did not read the
contents of a news posting). The spammer software began adding
the bogus addresses to the lists resulting in much uselessly
wasted bandwidth (in the form of undeliverable mails bouncing
back at them). Quote the spammers: "They've beaten us by hiding
their addresses inside the message! We will rewrite our software
to harvest from the message body and disregard clearly bogus
addresses." So once again, posters started getting spam. Quote
the posters: "They're reading bodies! We will munge our
addresses..."
This brings us to modern-day
cyberspace. When posting to a newsgroup, most posters munge
(fake/change) their addresses so humans can understand them but
harvesters can't. Munged addresses look something like "memyserverRemovethis.com"
Programs aren't as smart as people, particularly programs
written by spammers, so this safeguards inboxes from spam as
well as clogs up the spammers' lists with invalid addresses.
Always munge your address when posting to a newsgroup to
minimize your spam intake. Two good ways to do this:
1) Most email/news programs ask you for your return email
address in one of their setup menus. Enter your munged address
here before newsgroup forays, and change it back when finished.
(For heavy posters it's probably a better idea to get a
standalone newsreader, so you can enter your munged address once
and never have to change it back.)
2) Some newsreaders/email programs have a "send later" option
that will let you write a message while offline, storing it in a
file for when you decide to go online and send it out. Find the
file where these unsent messages are stored, open it in the
editor of your choice and change your outgoing address there.
●Enter-Address-Here
scams
You'll see it some place or
another--some box inviting you to type in your email
address...to enter some sort of contest, to join a nice-sounding
mailing list on a topic that interests you, to receive a Free
Gift or a Special Offer (remember that on the Internet this
phrase almost always means SPAM), to get a password to
Somebody's wrez server...
The excuses are many, the uses are few. When you see some form
asking you for your address, DON'T TYPE IT IN unless it is on
the site of a vendor with whom you regularly do business. This
is common sense to some people, but even the most savvy person
could be enticed by a form on a reputable-looking website.
●Signups
for services
They're not necessarily a
definite don't, but everyday signup forms are still an area
where caution must be used lest your address fall into the wrong
hands. Many sites require you to fill in a form with your name,
email address, and various other trivia before you can
participate in a chat, access certain portions of the site, get
listed on their search engine, or download software. With the
proliferation of these signup forms comes the quasi-spammer:
somewhere between a legit business and a spamming operation.
They don't actively go out and harvest addresses, and don't
technically violate any laws regarding contractual
agreements or misrepresentation, but they are nevertheless very
keen on the notion of profiting immensely from direct email
marketing and/or the sale of your address. Perhaps the key
question would be, "Can I still do _____ (download the software,
add my URL, etc.) without them having my real address?" If the
answer is yes, there's no reason they should have it; leave the
field blank or supply a bogus address.
Where you
*have to* give a valid email address (e.g. to receive password):
there are services that give you single-use or temporary-use
addresses.
●Online
directories
Try very hard not to get your
address listed on one of these things; anytime your address
appears in eprint it is an engraved invitation to have it
harvested. If your Web-based email, etc. gives you the option
"List me in ___ online directory", decline. Spammers are on them
like flies on honey.
Just in case you've been wondering. This
is actually a graphical image, not text. I don't want
the spammers to find this article!
Note: If you have let
That Nasty Little
out of the bag, you may have to change your
email address to avoid being tracked by the spambots.
Contact Us
for help cloaking your website email addresses.
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