I'm sure all of the people here in this forum experienced receiving spams. But the question is how in the hell spammers get those e-mail addresses? Simple, if you have your e-mail addresses posted on your website, or you are propagating your own e-mail add through message boards and giving away e-mail addresses on untrusted websites, you'll receive spam. In other words, the more your e-mail add is propagated, the more you'll receive spam.

Of course, there are also simple ways to reduce receiving spams.

1. If you have a website, hide your e-mail address from spammers by using Unicode characters -or- use something like this:
yournameREMOVETHIS@domain.com

E-mail address encoders should be Javascript. Unicode can be read by spammers using latest technologies. Just like search engines, they improve. Go to the ff: site
http://ssmedia.com/Utilities/Unicode/

2. Never post your e-mail addresses online especially on message boards. If it's necessary use an alternate e-mail address instead like Yahoo Mail because it already have a bulk mail feature.

3. Do not reply to spam or buy anything from spam e-mails. They will just know that your e-mail address is legitimate and will just be sold away to other spammers, thus, you'll receive more spams. Tsk tsk.

4. Also never unsubscribe. See No.3.

5. Instead of putting your e-mail address on your website, use a Formmail instead. Astahost, I believe provides that sort of pre-scripts. See your Cpanel and Formail. That will help a lot.

6. You can also use a temporary e-mail address just in case. Good ones are Mailinator.com

7. If you are really tired with the hundreds of spams you receive, use an e-mail filter. There's a lot of free ones on the web. Search on Google.

Note that if you use e-mail addresses of the big ones like Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL, Comcast, etc. you'll receive spam no matter what. Even you just made a new e-mail address (I have a new gmail account, never propagated to anywhere, but I still receive spam). Very few people knows exactly how spammers harvest addresses. Just like the mystery of Google search engine optimization. That's technology.

But if you use your own mail address from your ISP or your own domain name, take advantage of it. I had been careful with my e-mail address and from 2 months until now, I received zero spams.

Those are simple things you can do. It's not that hard so if we all cooperate, we can stop spam. However, spamming on forums is another story...

If you have any other ideas you want to add, just add it here. Many will appreciate it.

Spammers have their own technology which is very much like Google's bot. They have built their own spiders which crawls the web just like Google, except that spammers' bots are designed to look for exposed email addresses, ie emails posted on message boards, and so on as described by jtakano. So if your email address exists on some webpages, it could get picked up.

Such bots escpeially like to surf the databases of domain name registars because you need to provide a valid email address to order a domain.

There are things such as "disposable emails" you can use. What they do is generate an email address for you to use for things you sign up for you think might carry spam. They get deleted after a time or after a number of messages have reached the address.
An example is spamgourmet.

That is awesome!!! Thanks.. I will use the javascript! And also, that mailinator site is nifty.

A good way to help fight spammers is to link to this website. http://www.spamhelp.org/harvesterkiller/

This webpage randomly generates a 100 email addresses. At the bottom is another link that leads to more randomly generated email addresses. Email address harvesters or spambots would just fill up their databases with fake email addresses and continue to follow the link. They'll eventually end up in an infinite loop.

I totally agree about number 4. Based on my personal experience, i tried unsubscribing from different sites that keep sending me emails with ads and other stuff but after a few days or weeks, i'd still get emails from these sites. One in particular is FlowGo. So after reading about an article that you should never unsubscribe from these mailing lists, i followed it and what i do with those pesky spam mails, i just mark them as junk or spam and let my filters do the work.

usally a good to stop getting spams is by like u have said is not sign up for newsletters, not putting your email on your site and maybe putting a forward email addresse to your email addresse, or by not putting your email addresse in a email that u think is a spammer , and by when they send u spam look on the email to see if their is a part that say to unsicribe click here or some close to that

I read that many spam emails were sent by zombie machines....
so why not fight spam at the source, Put more pressure on poeple to keep there systems secure.

I'm resurecting this topic instead of creating another.

Some good posts in here to reduce spam. I use disposable email addresses from sneakemail.com (free account). It's a great tool to use for signing up for "stuff" on the internet. When the need is done, deactivate the email and "poof" no more spam.

It's a great tool to see who sells your email address. Every address you create will have the ID you put in there. One year down the road you start getting a bunch of different offers from one of the places you signed up for a newsletter or some other stuff. You also opted out of receiving any emails from partners etc. Here is the proof if you are receiving partner email.

As you can see from my sig file, I hate spam. I'd like to invoke death penalty for spamming...

I'm for spamtraps and I report all spam... I use scripts to give out random and unique "real" email addresses to spam harvesters. email addresses are created using donated mx addresses and there are email servers that collect all the spam received. This is a new way of limiting spam and it will help law enforcement to catch the harvesters.

I'm using a script in my email server to create a "RBL" Real Time Blocklist" of the IP addresses of boots that hit the trap. The RBL uses the /24 CIDR for that IP address because it looks like the initial "bounce" test comes from the same IP / IP range. The bounce test must to be a way they verify the email address before they incorporate it and sell the mailing list.

Seeding email addresses that "may" become a real address is not a good way to prevent spam. Some time in the future sombody may get that domain name and end up with spam from day one.

If you are using php on your website you can put a spamharvest page on your website. It's not visible to humans, good spiders and boots follow the rules and don't harvest. "BAD" spiders and boots follow the link and receive a timestamped email address and the IP address is logged. Follow the link on my page to see how you can help catch spam harvesters.

Nils

Hey Nilsc, Is there a way to set something like this up for our posts on the forum here? Like, putting a honeypot email in our sig somehow so that evil bots that hit this forum can be blacklisted?