How do you prevent spammers from getting your email address?

Answer 1

Well, do not click on any adds that you may see on the internet that need your e-mail address. Don't give your e-mail address to anyone but the people that you know (you never know if that person that said he would email you is actually going to use it to get to those adds!) Here is the answer from Ken Hollis and the alt.spam FAQ to "How *did* I get this unsolicited e-mail anyway?": Unfortunately just posting a message to a news group can get unsolicited e-mail. Some spammers "harvest" e-mail addresses by stripping e-mail return addresses out of messages people post. ... The solution to this is to "mung" your address when you post by adding in extra characters (like "Spam") in your return address. You then put in your signature something like "Remove the word Spam from my e-mail to contact me". See: http://www.private.org.il/harvest.html - How spammers harvest addresses http://home.cnet.com/software/0-3227888-8-6602372-1.html - Riskiest e-mail behaviors on the Net http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/mungfaq.html - Address Munging http://gamesbyemail.com/Documentation/AntiSpamEmailLinks/ - Examples of disguising your e-mail. http://www.applelinks.com/articles/2001/07/20010730122944.shtml - converting email addresses to "digital entities" http://www.inter-linked.com/content/spiderbait.php3 - A Java script to encode your e-mail address on a web page Larry suggests making your e-mail address into a JPEG (picture). You can't click on it and send a e-mail, but the spammers can't harvest your e-mail address either. Do not ever reply to the "unsubscribe" option in a spam. That only confirms your e-mail as "real" and gets your e-mail address sold to others. More spam for you. Another way to get e-mail is to have a World Wide Web page. Some spammers just start a web spider (a piece of software that just traverses World Wide Web pages and collects information) going and collect e-mail that way. To prevent your e-mail from being harvested, you can "mung" your web e-mail. Yet another way for spammers to verify your address is real is to have multiple unique pages to their site so that when you click on the URL they provide, they know that you (and only you) got that URL. See: http://CNN.com/2000/TECH/computing/01/14/email.privacy.idg/index.html Greg tells us of yet another clever trick. The spammer imbeds a unique image (Web Bug) in a spam e-mail so that just the act of opening the e-mail tells the spammer that your address is "live": img srcclusters_1-9 & image0 I have seen yet another trick that spammers use, they make the URL a web bug. When you have a link like http://NAIOKWDVDISY.adwarebde.com/?id=02025 the "name" of the web site NAIOKWDVDISY can uniquely identify what e-mail address that spam was sent to. Just doing a NSLookup of the name will point out the e-mail address of the person that the spam was sent to thus identifying a "live" person. Pierre suggests that when putting a mailto URL in a web page, precede and follow it with "%20". When someone clicks on it, it will merely put spaces, which will be ignored, around the address, but when a spammer harvests the address, it will have a %20 in it, which will render it undeliverable. Click on the Link below for the answer to all of your questions! www.something.com Just checking...

Answer 2

Depending on what website you have an account with, Google has a spam block. And you can mark emails from them as spam to get rid of any emails they send.