How to prevent email spam?

You should have heard much about spam. What exactly spam is? I define spam as something unrequested. For email spam, it is usually advertisement sent by bots to your email address - that is not requested by you. These bots collect emails by various method, and one of the common one is from websites.

Beware when giving out your email address using online forms, they might be one of those agents that collect email address and sell it to third parties. Sometimes, you might also show your email address on social websites profile, like Friendster and MySpace. Showing your email address on websites has a very high risk of being spam.

Do that mean that you can’t share your email address with others? No. You can share it, but in a way that only human will understand, and not bots. I will show you how, but I can’t assure you that it will work. I don’t know how tricky bots nowadays are, so the methods I show might be overcome by those bots.

Play around with symbols

Bot recognize email address by 2 ways, using the “@” symbol and those widely use email domains, like hotmail and gmail. Instead of writing your email address in a proper way like example@gmail.com, you can convert it to example|a|gmail [dot] com. You can then explain it to others so they understand what you mean, like “Please convert |a| to @ and [dot] to “.”. You can convert your email address to anything you feel that is readable by humans, but not bots.

Use image to represent email address

Instead of using text, you can also use images to represent your email address. If you usually spend your online time on community forums or blogs, you might notice them too.

Example:

Creating email address image
It is very easy to create such images. You can either do it manually using Photoshop or use a generator for easier task. Here’s some generators:

• Email Icon Generator - If you are using free email provider
• Safe Mail - If you are using your own domain as email
• Mask Email Image Generator - If you are using your own domain as email

Disclaimer: This article is written based on my experience. Some of the facts might not be correct or has been updated. If you found anything wrong, feel free to contact me and let me know.
[tags]spam,email,tips[/tags]

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