bob at example dot com: A Great Way to Give Spammers Your E-mail Address
Author: Nick
Category: Money
Topics: internet, time
Somewhere in the course of recent internet history, the following advice seems to have spread like wildfire:
“If your e-mail address is bob@example.com, you should never spell it out on websites or message boards as bob@example.com. Junk e-mailers have these ‘spider scripts’ which can harvest e-mail addresses from websites if they’re printed in their standard form. Instead you should say something like bob at example dot com.”
And so that’s what lots of people do on the internet…
My e-mail address is smart_dude at yahoo dot com
If you have questions about this offer, please contact sally at smartbusiness dot org
Hey d00d fr33 nak3d chiXoRz: nak3d_chiXoRz at omg-super-hot-girls dot yum
Hooray, address-harvesting spiders are defeated forever! Peace on earth, good will yadda yadda.
Guess what? Every time you say “bob at example dot com,” you have just told e-mail spammers that your address is bob@example.com.
But but but I didn’t have the funny little @ and the . is a dot so I’m safe, right? Right???
No! You’re not safe, Mr. Italics Bold! That’s because e-mail harvesting spiders can read and interpret “bob at example dot com” just as well as they can read “bob@example.com.” It’s as simple as programming the spider script to look for ” at ” in addition to “@” and ” dot ” along with “.”
Oh okay. So I’ll just come up with something more clever, like “bob -is at- example -period- com.” I am so smart!
No! You are so lame, Mr. Italics Bold! Spammers can just program their script to start with the “com” and work backworks, trying any number of combinations. It might pick up “example@period.com” and “is@example.com” as e-mail addresses, but it’ll also catch “bob@example.com.” And sending a single junk e-mail is virtually free, so spammers can still come out ahead even if only one out of thousands of e-mails they send actually hits a valid user!
I’m scared of the internet now! Time to go live in a cave! Call me when they fix this.
Sorry, Mr. Italics Bold, but this problem won’t be going away anytime soon. But there are some things you can do to protect yourself and your e-mail address from unwanted solicitations:
- Protect your e-mail address like you would your home address or phone number. If I put a form on this website asking you for your home phone number, would you fill it out? Heck no! You don’t want me calling you up at three in the morning. You might need to give out your e-mail address to more places than you do your phone number, but you should think long and hard each time you do it.
- Never post any part of your e-mail address in text form in a public location on the internet. As described earlier, it’s easy as spam pie to harvest those addresses, even if you obfuscate it with seemingly invalid syntax. Really, if you wanted to make “bob at example dot com” tricky enough to hide from spider scripts, it’d probably be too hard for people to understand it, too.
- Use alternate means of communication in public areas. If you need to post a method of contact in a public location, your personal e-mail address is not the way to do it. On message boards, instruct users to send you a private message (or “PM”) through the boards’ own messaging system. In other places, post a single-use or temporary e-mail address like those you can get at Mailinator. For more permanent setups like website contact pages, consider a form-based solution with a captcha and spam blockers to filter unwanted messages.
If you’d like more information on this subject, please input your e-mail address in the following form.
Hey, hey, hey! What’d I just finish saying? Don’t give out your e-mail address just because someone asks you for it!
But in all seriousness, go ahead and fill it out if you’d like more information.
What’re ya doin’??? Stop filling out random forms and go do something useful.
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33 Responses »
1.
The Sarcasticynic
November 16th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Yeah, it’s a pity that for each user who would send you something legitimate, there are fifty spammers looking to clobber you with their nonsense.
2.
Nick
November 16th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Hahaha, there were exactly 50 spam comments caught on Punny Money between your comment and the previous one.
3.
The Sarcasticynic
November 17th, 2006 at 7:12 am
I rest my case!
4.
moneysmartlife
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:28 am
You can always put your email in an image to beat the bots. I found a cool tool over at http://www.sr-ultimate.com/gmail-signature. You can see an example of how it looks at, http://moneysmartlife.com/img/sig.png
5.
Nick
November 22nd, 2006 at 9:52 am
That’s not a bad idea, moneysmartlife. Glad I thought of it when I started this here interweb site!
Of course, it only takes one person bent on revenge to submit your e-mail address to every subscription link on the internet, so even that’s not full-proof.
6.
denon
December 8th, 2006 at 11:36 am
It’s funny how quickly people forget that OCR is a very mature technology these days. I’ve actually seen web spiders that do an incredible job at OCR’ing images – even ones that are deemed to be relatively obscure. Of course, if you use an image generator, it’ll be even easier as they’ll have seen a thousand others like it.
hmm .. looks like this goofy guy wants me to put my email in to submit this comment….
7.
mapgirl
June 25th, 2007 at 9:05 pm
ok. Now you’re making me paranoid! That’s why I have an address listed just for blogging which says “Google’s mail service” instead of a domain name. I figure if they’re too stupid to figure out what that means, I don’t want them to email me anyway. (I’m not joking about that.)
8.
Bob Holness
December 24th, 2007 at 6:39 am
Hey! Stop publishing my email address on your blog. My spam has increased drastically since you wrote this article.
9.
Obbop
January 26th, 2008 at 1:48 am
Sheesh, so easy to beat the bots.
Just use heiroglyphics when writing thine e-mail address.
10.
alliedtrustdiamond
June 7th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
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The only guaranteed method to repair your credit is to pay off the old bills and get your derogatory balances to $0. “Well that isn’t very helpful” is probably what you are saying. Since none of us just have cash laying around to do that there are other things you can do that are guaranteed to increase your FICO score practically overnight and start rebuilding your credit.
It’s actually very simple. Sign up for Millennium Secured Credit Card and send them $300. Buy $90 worth of groceries on it and make the payments. Keep the balance under $90. Then sign up for http://www.alliedtrustdiamond.com and get a $10,000 unsecured credit card, buy something and make the payments. Do a google search for USA Shopping Club and sign up with them for $12,500 unsecured credit card buy something and make the payments, Eclub USA and get your $3,500 credit card and finally Horizon Gold and get your $500 credit card.
Once all of these companies report to the credit bureaus you are going to see an immediate increase in your FICO score. Guaranteed. Then you can work on getting the bad marks paid off and removed. It’s much easier to get them permanently deleted if you don’t owe them any more money.
11.
Temporary Inbox
July 16th, 2009 at 1:36 am
QuickInbox.com offers a great temporary inbox service. It only takes a few seconds to create your inbox (no registration required) .
Check it out at:
http://www.quickinbox.com
12.
battery-stores
May 15th, 2010 at 3:59 am
oh, Great articl! I will keep this post.
13.
eWallet
June 18th, 2010 at 6:13 pm
I had absolutely no idea that it was impossible to trick these guys with a written out address… shoulda known.
14.
cosplay
July 26th, 2010 at 3:54 am
I completely agree with you , all of the thank you emails that I get at work eat up so much of my time. Not only that but I also usually feel obligated to reply which wastes even more time and resources.
15.
IT技术
August 20th, 2010 at 2:29 am
Sometimes when I read your blog,…..I think
I’m falling in love! You are right on!
16.
دليل
December 10th, 2010 at 4:46 am
Thank you for this article serious and truly impressive
17.
Scott
January 19th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Hi Nick, and thanks for the tips. Email spam truly is very difficult to get rid of, but what if you just HAVE to give out your email address? How can you let people contact you if not give your email address?
18.
Thermal Mugs
March 4th, 2011 at 10:18 pm
I have a email I use for “junk” one for rebates and semi-junk (stuff that I may want to check, but realize the company is probably going to put me on their mailing list) and one more for family and friends that I check daily. Seems to keep everything sorted out fairly well.
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