Obscure All Email Addresses
Before Posting Them Online
You should never post an email address -- yours, ours, or anyone else's -- on an online webpage, forum, or bulletin board without first obscuring it somehow. Spammers use special programs that extract email addresses from websites and online postings, and if you post a "naked" email address online, it will become a piece of contaminated junk in a heartbeat.
The easiest way to obscure an email address that you want to include on a web page, bulletin board, guestbook, or forum is to obscure that address by inserting something obvious into it.
For example, if an email address is nobody@nowheresville.com, you can post it as
- nobody@nowhDELETE_CAPSeresville.com or as
- nobody ATSYMBOL nowheresville DOT com or as
- ...well, you get the idea
Webmasters among you should already know about (or investigate forthwith) some of the code-based methods for safely offering "mailto" links online.
THIS IS WAR. DON'T GIVE IT AWAY!
Spammers use dozens of techniques to get our email addresses.... and never post an unobscured email address online.
- See this article for a description of some of these methods
- See this article for other ways to thwart them