Loading...You might have got lots of spams since you got familiar with the world wide web. There might be very little or no people who aren’t the sufferers. Not only emails but articles on news sites and blogs posts get spams as well. According to the latest research the total volume of spams is 100 million emails a day which is quite an alarming number. Email addresses are usually collected from chat rooms, websites, Trojans and newsletters as well, but one amazing thing is that most of the spams are sent to invalid email addresses. Most spams have links to websites and it is said that 99.68 % of those websites are hosted in only five countries worldwide. So with the exponential increase in the number of spams and spammers it has become imperative that everyone get conscious about keeping themselves miles away from spams.
Some Spam Protection Measures
Stay away from email chains,do not forward emails that have been forwarded to you and a lot of people. They serve as a mine of email addresses to the spammers. But if you are tempted to forward it remember to remove the heading and remove all the links within the email.
Never enter your email addresses in websites, either it may be your own page or visiting book or social networking sites, if you really want to give yourself some spam protection. Spammers create bots or use email extracting softwares which can harvest emails from any site. Those having their own websites can enter a contact form that can completely hide the email addresses. On many websites there is a checkbox saying “Don’t receive commercial emails”, check the box in such case if you intend to enter your email id there.
There might be conditions when you need to receive important mail and the website requests for your email address. Never give your email address in that case either. For this very purpose there are a lot of sites which provide disposable email addresses. Some of them are:
- pookmail.com
- spamgourmet.com
- mytrashmail.com
- spambob.com
- mailinator.com
Thus you can keep your personal email address protected from spam and use the disposable addresses for receiving any important mail relayed by websites.
If the mail you receive is a spam and of no interest to you, you won’t reply to that message. But sometime if you are tempted never do that because spammers know that the email is valid and so next time you may get a lot more bulk of spams. You can protect your email address from the spammers obfuscating (also called munging, or encoding) it.
The browsers automatically convert this into characters so your visitors won’t have any problem. That way the format of the email address will be changed so the bots won’t be able to recognize it as an email address. The most common way to obfuscate an email address is by converting it to ASCII format. Like 64 is the ASCII decimal character code, and &# is the html code for @ symbol. So for me@example.com you can write:me64example.com or me@example.com. You can visit www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html or anti-spam.hostbankoi.com/codificaremail.asp. to encode your email addresses in various ways. It is also possible that hackers might have fooled this tool but at least you can hope for some protection.
Whenever you have to use your email address anywhere you try to insert it in image format if possible because the spammers cannot harvest email addresses from images.If you are to send email to a number of people use the BCC(Black Carbon Copy) instead of using CC. This way the addresses are not visible to other recipients.
Do not leave the subject. And if you are replying to an email do not use the same subject,change it.
These are some of the tricks that might give you some spam protection. But who knows when you get spams and in what way???