Why shouldn't I post my email address in a public forum?

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Summary: Spammers harvest email via a variety of means. One of the most common is to simply surf the web and look for anything that might be an email address.

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The why is easy.

The what to do? Not so much.

Why is it a bad idea? In a word, spam.

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Anything that will put your email address on to a publicly accessible web page will, in all likelihood, cause you to start getting more and more and more and more spam. Why? Because one technique that spammers use is to visit all the web pages that they can, and collect anything that looks like an email address to add to their mailing list.

Here's an example: muchspam@ask-leo.com - now that I've published that email address on the web on this page, even though it's the only place that email address has or will be officially mentioned, it will now start getting spammed. Just because it was published on a web page, and it looks like a valid email address.

So when you include your email address in an on-line posting - say on a discussion board, or even in a comment here on Ask Leo!, you're almost literally asking for spam.

Don't do it.

In my case, you'll notice that in order to post a comment on Ask Leo!, you're required to provide an email address. But notice also, that that email address is not published on the web page (in my case, if you use a valid email address, it's simply a way for me to follow up with you directly should I have a question about your comment). But be careful - not all weblogs and discussion forums hide your email address. Many turn right around and put it on the web page for all to see. Including the spammers.

Before you post anywhere be sure you know what's going to happen to your email address when you do.

Are you a member of a mailing list? Does that mailing list have an on-line archive? Then your email address may be available to the spammers for harvesting. Ever post on Usenet? The email you used is probably already in the spammer's lists. An early Usenet post "before I knew better" is the reason my wife gets hundreds of spam per day.

So use a fake address - or better yet, don't use one at all.

Now, what if you need to post your email address in a publicly accessible place? There are several techniques for obfuscating the address. Here are a couple of my favorites:

askleo at gmail.com
askleo@gmail.seeohem

The first you've probably seen already in other places. It simply requires that you, as a human, realize that the " at " needs to be replaced with "@". My fear is that this technique is also fairly easy to decode by computer, and the spammers will soon catch on.

The second requires some thought. If you sound out "seeohem", you'll realize that it sounds like c, o, m. "com". Hence you realize that the ".seeohem" really means ".com" and can make that translation when you type in the email address.

The biggest drawback to these approaches is that the email links are not clickable. Anything you can click on to get an email address, the spammers can use to harvest it. Even copy-paste doesn't work, for exactly the same reason.

But protecting yourself from spam is important. And not asking for more, is even more important.

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Article C2397 - August 3, 2005

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