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This week someone asked me on Twitter whether she could have my email address, and 'complained' I was hard to reach for the folks reading my blog. So I have got an obfuscated "e-mail-me" button on my blog now.
Usually I'm not so keen on putting email addresses on the web, because doing so usually generates a lot of spam. This is caused by spybots who 'graze' html content on the Internet for email addresses. Every one they find, they send to spammers who use them to send tons of unwanted mail.
Therefore I'm very careful to keep my inbox clean. The event also inspired me to write this post. There are several easy ways to avoid spam:
- Never fill out web forms using your primary email address. I usually have one email-account on Yahoo! that I use for this purpose. If I have to give my mail address in order to download something, I give this address I never read.
- When posting your email address on any webpage, it will be harvested by spybots sooner or later. Invisible pages are an exception to this rule (e.g. pages only visible after login, when given the rights to view it).
To avoid this you can make a transparant .gif picture with your email address and upload it. You can link to it and make your email address visible, without the chance being harvested. This is a lot of work. Another way you can make your email address 'unharvestable' is by obfuscating it. You can put an html 'mailto' tag in your post (when the board allows you to post in html) and obfuscate your actual email address by 'spelling' it in hexadecimal (or other) code. It will look normal in any browser, but in the html-source of the page, there is only hexadecimal code visible.
If you don't know how to obfuscate your address, google 'obfuscated email' and you will be shown sites where you can do it and copy-paste the code into your post between html tags and voilà. - Use the BCC field when sending email to lots of people in your email client. BCC means 'blind carbon copy'. When you put all those email addresses in that field, everyone will get a copy of the mail, without seeing to whom the mail is sent. They will see 'undisclosed recipient' in their 'to' field and your address in the 'From' field. You can add your own email address at the 'To' field as a routine. Some email clients refuse to send mail when the 'To' Field is empty.
The reason why this will keep your inbox clean is that when someone's mailbox is infected by a worm-virus, all the addresses found in emails can be sent to spyware servers. Some viruses are specially designed to collect email addresses for spamming.
Posted under Tips & Tricks
This post was written by Inge on May 9, 2007
