Posting Your Email Address to Blog Comments, Forums, Social Networking Sites, and Other Web Places Will Cause You to Get Spam   1/2/2008 - 1,960 views, 2 Comments

The act of scraping websites to collect email addresses (to then spam them) is known as harvesting email addresses. Email address harvesting is still one of the more popular methods of building lists of email addresses to send spam to. And email addresses posted by people in comments on blogs, social network sites, or really just about anywhere else, are fair game.

So how can you let people know how to contact you by email while still protecting your email address from spammers?

Here, using the email address test@example.com as an example, are various ways you spell out your email address, while still thwarting the email address harvesters:

1. Spell out the “@”, like this:

test at example.com

2. Spell out the “.com” like this:

test@example dot com.

3. Spell out the entire thing, like this:

test at example dot com

4. Use a graphic which shows the email address as an image, like this:

(The above is really a graphic image!)

5. Write the email address in HTML character code, instead of traditional letters. For example, while this looks normal to you:

test@example.com

..we have actually written it in HTML character code, in which every letter and symbol is represented by a special HTML code, which your web browser translates to display a letter, but to another computer it doesn’t look like an email address at all.

Here are some sample HTML character codes:

You can find a complete chart of the HTML character codes here.

Here at the Internet Patrol we actually use a nifty program called Spam Stopper to do the HTML character encoding for us, however you can do it right online, for free, using this free HTML code email address encoding page offered by Jean-Marc Rosengard of Syronex!

Using Mr. Rosengard’s page, you can encode your email address, and then save it somewhere. Whenever you want to post your email address to the Internet, copy and paste that code, instead of typing in your email address.

It doesn’t matter which of these methods you choose to make your email addresses spam resistant - you may even choose to use another method. The important thing is that you don’t post your regular email address, in plain text, for all the world - and all the spammers - to grab.