Protecting your E-mail address from spam bots
Common wisdom helps you achieve that: never publishing your contact information in a trivially machine readable form (e.g. writing it out in the clear at the top of your site, by the way: click here to see my E-mail address book ) and avoid getting into circumstances that can transitively result in the former case. I, however, can give you some more advanced advice.
Create accounts with names that are randomly generated and are at least 8 character long each. Don't let your more valuable addresses get into other people's address books, because malware can easily harvest it from there. If only one in a hundred will get infected, your address is breached for good. So you mustn't give away all of your addresses to everybody.
Don't hesitate to change your address if you receive spam: your digital signature can identify you regardless of location. In fact, only your digital signature can identify you, and the address a given message has been sent from is irrelevant, because it can be easily forged.
Always keep at least one account that could be sacrificed - one that gets changed often. You can use this if you need to give contact information to a stranger - or to anyone you don't plan to keep contact with for long. You could give him or her one of your better trusted addresses anytime afterwards if you wish.
update 1: If you have Gmail, you get a bunch of accounts automatically by using plus addressing, vary letter case and dot placement: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/980/use-gmail-plus-addressing-to-generate-throw-away-e-mail-addresses/, http://blog.brzezinka.eu/webmaster-tips/gmail-address-case-and-dot-insensitive
Create accounts with names that are randomly generated and are at least 8 character long each. Don't let your more valuable addresses get into other people's address books, because malware can easily harvest it from there. If only one in a hundred will get infected, your address is breached for good. So you mustn't give away all of your addresses to everybody.
Don't hesitate to change your address if you receive spam: your digital signature can identify you regardless of location. In fact, only your digital signature can identify you, and the address a given message has been sent from is irrelevant, because it can be easily forged.
Always keep at least one account that could be sacrificed - one that gets changed often. You can use this if you need to give contact information to a stranger - or to anyone you don't plan to keep contact with for long. You could give him or her one of your better trusted addresses anytime afterwards if you wish.
update 1: If you have Gmail, you get a bunch of accounts automatically by using plus addressing, vary letter case and dot placement: http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/980/use-gmail-plus-addressing-to-generate-throw-away-e-mail-addresses/, http://blog.brzezinka.eu/webmaster-tips/gmail-address-case-and-dot-insensitive
Spam poison links are our friends. I just always forget to put them out to my pages. Thank to your reminder I have just updated my blog to contain a trap for these evil e-mail harvesters.
ReplyDeletere: Szik
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! :) I have another trick: only accept mail that has been digitally signed and certified to be a non-spammer human based on the signature. There is no other 100% solution.
Cheers!