How they find you

People find that they get spammed once they:

• Post a message on a newsgroup
• Give their address to an online retailer
• Sign up for an internet service that asks for an e-mail address
• E-mail a spammer asking them to remove their address from the mailing list (sad, but true - more often than not this just confirms that your e-mail address is active!)
• Give out their e-mail address on their own website

Unfortunately, once you're on a spam list it's practically impossible to escape. But avoiding these traps may help you avoid getting more of the same in the future.

First Steps

Now you know how valuable your e-mail address is, think about whether the sites that ask for it really need it.

You can always 'accidentally' misspell your address when you register. The only problem with this is some sites insist on sending an e-mail with your password to get in the site and without it you can't get in!

You might prefer to set up an e-mail account solely for the purpose of writing to newsgroups or buying online.

Your ISP may offer you a number of addresses or you could use a free e-mail account from a web-based e-mail provider such as Hotmail, Yahoo! or Lycos.

In this way these special accounts will attract the spam you receive away from your normal e-mail account.

Munging

If you have your own website don't put your e-mail address in a 'mailto' tag which can be detected by spambots. Spambots are programs that search for e-mail addresses over the web.

If you need to give your e-mail address on your own website you can spell out parts of the e-mail address or you can try 'munging' the e-mail address.

Munging means that the e-mail address is transformed into another form which is easily read by somebody but not by spambots.

Preview

Some spammers look for e-mail addresses by randomly combining popular names as well as words from dictionaries with popular e-mail domains like hotmail.com.

So how do they know if the address is a real one or not? More advanced spammers put tiny invisible images into the e-mails that are stored on their website.

Then, when you view the e-mail, your e-mail program visits their site to get the image and hey presto, they know that your e-mail address is being used.

That's why it's a good idea to turn off the 'preview' feature in e-mail programs that shows you a bit of each e-mail before you open it.

Just previewing is enough to let spammers know your e-mail address is active so they'll send you even more mail.