How do you stop Spam? After all, that is what this section has been leading up to. Well, the first line of defense is not to get onto their email lists in the first place. As mentioned previously, the main ways they get your email address are you submitting your email address to a website and email harvesters scanning your email address off the web. So, your first line of defense, obviously, is not to provide your email address in a fashion where a spammer can get it. Here are some ways to do it.
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Use a Junk Email Account
Using a free, web-based email account such as that provided by Google, Yahoo or Hotmail can be one way to avoid spam in your personal email account. Sign up for such an account. Whenever you are posting your email address in forms on questionable sources or in newsgroups, use this sacrificial email account. These email services have spam filters of their own. Plus, since this is a sacrificial email account, you don’t really care what goes in there. You can just check the account every few days at your leisure. In order for this to work, you have to never post your personal email account to the web. You also need to not forward email from your sacrificial account to your main account.
Spell Out Your Address
When posting your email address in public places like forums or newsgroups, you can spell out your account rather than entering it properly formatted. For example, enter “david at nospam.com”, david at nospam dot com” or “davidNOSPAM@nospam.com”, assuming your real address is david@nospam.com.
The idea is that a real person could obviously figure out your real email address, but an email harvester would not recognize it as a valid address. If posting your address to the web in HTML, do not use the mailto: tag. Even if the browser shows the altered email address, email harvesters scan the HTML code, not the visible text. So, even if your email address is hidden in the HTML code, it will still be harvested.
Contact Forms
If you use a contact form for people to email you, do not use a standard form-to-mail script which has your email address in the form’s HTML code as a hidden field. As said above, harvesters scan the code itself, and they will find it. Instead, it is best to submit the form to a script which contains your email address in the source code. This way it remains server-side and harvesters cannot get to it.
Email Images
Another way to display your email address but hide it from harvesters is to display your email address in the form of an image. This way people can see your address, but harvesters cannot. This will only work if you do not hyperlink the image to your real email address.
Using Javascript to Hide Emails
If posting your address to a webpage, you can also use javascript to create a working email link “on the fly”, but in the source code of the page it is not readable. If interested in this, you can search the web for such a script. Javascript programming is not within the scope of this article.
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