"Protecting Email from Spammers" Topic

Some people say that to protect your email address from spammers when posting to a discussion group or forum, you should use the format name(at)whatever(dot)com.

That's got to be an urban myth.

If you're using any kind of pattern, then some bot can harvest your email address.

But worse yet, all it takes is one friend with (a) your address in his email software and (b) bad security to give your address away to some spammer.

So why worry about it. You really can't protect an email address from spammers.

I have 2 email accounts. #1 I only gave out to people personally. #2 I used for web forums, so and so forth.

Guess which got all the spam. #1

I checked the "forum" address a while back and it only had 3 spam meesages.

My 'working' address gets no spam, persoally given out only to friends address gets loads, I recomend the free download mailwasher, it lets you check subject and sender before downloading so you can delete the spam without sending a read reciept, it cuts the volume of spam quite considerably once you look like a dead address to spammers.

Robert

My gungnir e-mail address which is posted on several sites gets far more spam than my real name one which is known to many people, so judging by that it does make a difference. Bit of a small sample, I know, but significant to me.

I try to be careful with my address, but once a week one of my friends invites me to join some web thing or sends me an e-vite or some other ridiculous thing.

Until we get better mail standards we just have to use local filters.

On the other hand, I've had sbcglobal DSL for nearly a year and my address is posted a couple of places, and I'm getting precious little spam. My old email address got fifty a day. Maybe SBC is doing something everyone should do.

Andrew