Do You Invite Your Own SPAM, or Worse?!

I am endlessly amazed at how often I come across email addresses posted in online communities and forums, and on their websites. I can’t understand why anyone would do it. Then it occurred to me recently that there must just be many folks who don’t realize the consequences of doing this! So I thought I’d point out the two biggest risks of posting your email address online.

1. You are volunteering to get lots more SPAM. If you don’t already know this, there are programs that are designed to scour the entire Internet, collecting email addresses for the purpose of sending SPAM. The culprits are generally called Spambots. They crawl the Web in search of email addresses that are posted there, free for the taking. And when they get them, guess what, you start getting more SPAM!

2. You put yourself at risk for Spoofing. Spoofing is when an email is sent that appears to be from one source, but it’s really from another (usually a spammer). I have heard lots of complaints from website owners about receiving emails that they appear to have sent to themselves; or they get emails from people telling them to stop sending them emails–which of course, they didn’t send. This is a perfect example of spoofing. And one really easy way to get spoofed is post your email address on your website, or in forums.

You need to protect your email addresses, people. If you must post it in a forum or on your website, do it in such a way that makes it impossible (or at least really difficult) for it to be collected by spambots and other programs. Here are some tips…

* Type Out the Address: MyName at mydomain dot com.
* Insert a BLAH: MyName@mydomainBLAH.com (instruct folks to remove the BLAH)
* Use a Graphic: Instead of listing your email address, put it on a graphic and add the graphic to the page instead. But DON’T use the Mailto hyperlink with the graphic so that people can click the graphic and compose an email. Spambots know what mailto links are and they collect those too! You can use an ALT tag though, for folks who don’t view images on web pages. But do it smartly, make the ALT tag spell out your address as listed above (MyName at mydomain dot com).

There are other things you can do as well, but these are the easiest to use. Be smart with your email address (and other people’s email addys as well!); you really should protect it as much as possible. If you don’t, and if you are careless about posting it on the Internet, you are likely the cause of a lot of your own SPAM.