Prevention
Spam is probably one of the most difficult problems we have to deal with. E-Mail-filters may help you a bit, but are always not 100% bullest proof to help you. Also every company does not offer email-filters. The best way spammers track down your email id is the display e-mail-addresses on a web-page/pages or forums, sites, forward mails or from you online signatures.
Never purchase something from the sender of SPAM.
If it wasn't profitable, it wouldn't exist. However, you cannot blame a manufacturer for deceptive, fraudulent, or inappropriate behavior by an unauthorized dealer. Some manufacturers have become targets of what amounts to smear campaigns by spammers. Symantec is one example. Varous parties are sending out SPAM advertising Symantec products but Symantec has no relation to these parties.
The more your e-mail address is available, the more spam you'll receive. Minimize this availability for your primary e-mail account. Free webmail accounts are available for the asking although you should review the provider's privacy policy before signing up. Use a separate account when possible and appropriate to use for things like: postings, newsgroup postings, forum postings, blog postings, signatures, web site registrations, web site publication, etc.
How can you make sure that not a single spam mail will find its path to the inbox of your client? Well its not 100% but lets try to do a bit so that spammers can't find a way. Let remove our email id from being online.. huh? That's not a solution, business requires email id to be online so that someone can contact you. So how should one display e-mails on a web-page in order to minimize spam attacks? Let’s take a look at some solutions and techniques which will help you to prevent spam.
Sometimes web-developers tend to rewrite the original e-mail, so spam-bots can’t recognize it. This method might solve the problem, but spam-bots might catch on this sooner or later. Spammers and spam bots are getting intelligent hence we need to keep working out on other things. Also many users might have problems decoding it - unless you provide some instructions how to decode the text.
Yeah many people who need to contact you may often not even be able to understand you explaination, but let's try, here are some solutions below which may be helpful and are often used by many people on the internet. * Replace dots with “d-o-t”, “@” with [at] and as many spaces as possible. Example: e-mail@office.com -> e-mail [at] office [d-o-t] com * Insert some characters before and after the “@”-symbol. Example: e-mail@office.com -> e-mail {!@!} office.com. * Avoid typing direct email id's - e-mails like info@domain.com, service@domain.com, admin@domain.com are likely to be spammed anyway.
Replace text with images Apparently, most spam-bots don’t scan images on the web, I may not be 100% correct who knows as I said before spammer and spam bots are getting intelligent. But lets atleast try something. Today there are many online tools that generate image with yout text onto them. This way is much better than directly posting your email addresses onlone. * services.nexodyne.com/email/index.php >> Generator for GMail, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo!, AOL and many more. * www.signaturegenerator.net >> Does basically the same as above.
Replace text with ASCII and Javascript-coded text Another popular approach is to represent e-mail-adresses as ASCII code or Javascript-coded text. Users don’t see any difference in e-mail-presentation, but spam-bots won’t find the e-mail analyzing the source code - well, not yet. Some web-tools to convert e-mail links to ASCII code: * www.iconico.com/emailProtector * www.ianr.unl.edu/email/encode .
Best Solution Write email id's in a Images or Ascii/Javascript codes may not always be the best solution. Best way to create two e-mail-accounts - the one for business contacts, which will be used only for communication with partners and serious clients and the second one, which will be decoded and published on the Web for any other purposes.