Protect Your E-mail by Obfuscatoin
E-mail harvesting is the process of obtaining lists of e-mail addresses from the internet.
This is usually done for use in bulk e-mail and for various other purposes that can generally be described as 'spam' (ie the mass sending of unsolicited e-mails).
Spammers can generate e-mail lists in several ways: the purchase of e-mail lists from other spammers or the use of special web spiders known as 'harvesting bots' or 'harvesters' that crawl Web pages, Usenet postings, mailing list archives or Blogs in the search for e-mail addresses.
Another method used to harvest bulk emails is to used a method called a 'dictionary attack'.
For this method the spammer takes the common email domains 'yahoo.
com', 'hotmail.
com', 'btinternet.
com' etc.
A dictionary of personal names is then used to prepend those names to domains such as the ones above.
These messages are sent and any messages that are delivered rather than being bounced back 'undeliverable' can then be added to the spammer's sending list.
Another e-mail harvesting scam is to use a popup or web page that promises a free product or service if the user provides a valid e-mail address to sign-in with.
The addresses can then be collected as potential spam targets.
If you use the internet for your business and if you have a website or participate in forums then you will probably be publishing your emails on the web.
This makes your email address vulnerable to harvesting spiders.
Most of these email harvesters know that they have encountered an e-mail address by looking for mailto: links or @ signs within your web pages.
Just remember that you should never publish a non-encoded or non-protected e-mail address anywhere on the internet.
If you run your own site and can run perl applications then you can use a form-mail application to allow users to contact you which completely hides your email address.
Relatively low-tech methods for protecting your email address would include the following:
You could, however, post your e-mail address as an image, which is guaranteed to protect it.
There are also more comprehensive ways of hiding your email address, such as encoding the entire email address as unicode UTF-8 and using JavaScript to publish it.
You can also encode the e-mail address as jumbled HTML and use CSS code to display it.
This is usually done for use in bulk e-mail and for various other purposes that can generally be described as 'spam' (ie the mass sending of unsolicited e-mails).
Spammers can generate e-mail lists in several ways: the purchase of e-mail lists from other spammers or the use of special web spiders known as 'harvesting bots' or 'harvesters' that crawl Web pages, Usenet postings, mailing list archives or Blogs in the search for e-mail addresses.
Another method used to harvest bulk emails is to used a method called a 'dictionary attack'.
For this method the spammer takes the common email domains 'yahoo.
com', 'hotmail.
com', 'btinternet.
com' etc.
A dictionary of personal names is then used to prepend those names to domains such as the ones above.
These messages are sent and any messages that are delivered rather than being bounced back 'undeliverable' can then be added to the spammer's sending list.
Another e-mail harvesting scam is to use a popup or web page that promises a free product or service if the user provides a valid e-mail address to sign-in with.
The addresses can then be collected as potential spam targets.
If you use the internet for your business and if you have a website or participate in forums then you will probably be publishing your emails on the web.
This makes your email address vulnerable to harvesting spiders.
Most of these email harvesters know that they have encountered an e-mail address by looking for mailto: links or @ signs within your web pages.
Just remember that you should never publish a non-encoded or non-protected e-mail address anywhere on the internet.
If you run your own site and can run perl applications then you can use a form-mail application to allow users to contact you which completely hides your email address.
Relatively low-tech methods for protecting your email address would include the following:
- example at domain dot com: which can be transliterated to example@domain.
com.
Using the word forms of at (@) and dot (.
) effectively obfuscates the mail address. - e x a m p l e @ d o m a i n .
c o m: here the spaces obfuscates the mail address but it can easily be read by a human. - example@domain.
com: here the UTF-8 values for @ and .
are used to obfuscate the web address.
moc.
niamod@elpmaxe: a simple but effective technique which is simply to invert the entire email address. - elpmaex@moc.
niamod: a variant on the example above where the name and domains of the email are separately inverted. - example@domainNOSPAM.
con.
invalid.
The invalid is a special top-level domain which is added to ensure that a valid email address is not accidentally created.
Simply remove the uppercase characters and the .
invalid domain to give and active e-mail address.
You could, however, post your e-mail address as an image, which is guaranteed to protect it.
There are also more comprehensive ways of hiding your email address, such as encoding the entire email address as unicode UTF-8 and using JavaScript to publish it.
You can also encode the e-mail address as jumbled HTML and use CSS code to display it.
