How to cut down on spam

By Maria Trombly

According to research by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and several law enforcement partners, spammers typically use computer programs that search public areas on the Internet to compile, capture, or otherwise "harvest" lists of email addresses from web pages, newsgroups, chat rooms, and other online destinations.

To find out which fields spammers consider most fertile for harvesting, investigators "seeded" 175 different locations on the Internet with 250 new, undercover email addresses. The locations included web pages, newsgroups, chat rooms, message boards, and online directories for web pages, instant message users, domain names, resumes, and dating services. During the six weeks after the postings, the accounts received 3,349 spam emails.

The investigators found that:

• 86 percent of the addresses posted to web pages received spam. It didn't matter where the addresses were posted on the page: if the address had the "@" sign in it, it drew spam.
• 86 percent of the addresses posted to newsgroups received spam.
• Chat rooms are virtual magnets for harvesting software. One address posted in a chat room received spam nine minutes after it first was used.

What's a writer to do? You want to be able to post your email address on your website so that editors can reach you, but you already have too much spam. The answer is to disguise your email address -- for example, replacing all the letters with their equivalent numerical codes.

To save you the trouble of looking up all the letters in the ASCII code tables, you can get a free conversion at a very nice website by Manas Tungare.