Posting Your Email Address to Blog Comments, Forums, Social Networking Sites, and Other Web Places Will Cause You to Get Spam

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To help avoid email spam, it’s important to not post your email addresses openly on the Internet – for example, in comments on blogs, in user forums, and on social networking sites. You may think that this is obvious, but plenty of people still do it, and then wonder why they get so much Internet spam – for example spam from web-site contact form links. Good spam protection begins at home – to help avoid junk email spam reduce your own email address footprint and make your email addresses spam resistant. You can do this by posting your email address in a way that allows humans to know how to contact you, but which cannot be recognized as an email address by spamming programs. Here’s how.

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:

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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.

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9 thoughts on “Posting Your Email Address to Blog Comments, Forums, Social Networking Sites, and Other Web Places Will Cause You to Get Spam

  1. I found this service called Bouncr (http://boun.cr) which you can use to hide your email address beyond a proxy. Works great!

  2. Thanks for this post.Few month ago i use my business mail address for commenting a site.But after this they have send lot of mail in their various offer which it unwanted for me.So i agree with you that before sharing mail in online every one should more careful about this.

  3. tactics like spelling out at and dot don’t work as effectively as they used to and if a person really wants to keep themselves safe (speaking only for forums) stick to private messages. If you really want to give out your email address you can do it there. It just makes sense and I don’t know why more people don’t just do that and safe themselves from all the spam hassles! I swear people need lessons in internet safety before they should be allowed to post anything on any sites.

  4. Lets me speak how could be known the internet whenever we are doing the email address copy paste .

  5. Hi guys,
    My PC worked not correctly, too much mistakes and buggs. Please, help me to fix buggs on my PC.
    I used Win Vista.
    With best regards,
    Feegolera

  6. Goodday I’m new here
    And it looks like a interesting forum, so just wanted to say hello! :):):)
    And looking forward to participating.
    Going on vacation for a few days, so i’ll be back

  7. Good Day

    Just wanted to share my new experience.

    If your system denies to run due to an error corresponding to lost HAL.DLL, invalid Boot.ini or any other critical system boot files you can repair this by using the XP installation CD. Just boot from your XP Setup CD and enter the Recovery Console. Then launch “attrib -H -R -S” on the C:\Boot.ini file and delete it. Launch “Bootcfg /Rebuild” and then Fixboot

    Cheers,
    Carl

  8. You can also use the link shorting sites as tool to create a url that is really a url in disguise. actually maps to my email address.

    :-)

    You just have to be trickier than the harvesters.

    Use gmail as your spam filter. For example, forward your external email into a “crazy” (i.e.: abxdefgh@gmail) gmail account and then pull it into Outlook minus the spam.

    fwiw,
    fjohn

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