Spam - how to avoid it 

More computer tips

The main thing is to never leave your e-mail address on a webpage without encoding it so the mailto tag is hidden well. the whole mailto:youraddress@yourdomain.com inside the link code should be encoded. Here's one place to encode it: http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html

If you sign guestbooks using your e-mail address, prepare to get a lot of spam. Some guestbooks will obfuscate the addresses, but still very few. One way to possibly get by the spambots is to enter the address in human readable form only, such as myaddress at mydomain dot com. I'm sure some spambots will figure it out, but most of them go for the mailto tag still.

You should still use a service that filters out spam (such as Hotmail and Yahoo) if you plan on leaving your address on guestbooks and other places trawled by spambots.

To check my theories, I put in a spamtrap address on selected pages on one of my sites, just to see how fast it would generate spam.

After about a week I received about 4 virus-infected e-mails, and 5 spam mails (three of the Nigerian fraud variety). Since I now encode my main addresses, it's a test (marked clearly spamtrap), to see how the spambots handle things.

However, my main address, that's entered in an encoded form on those same pages - did not get caught by the same spambots, except in one instance (and I don't know if they had it from a previous run, of course. If they harvested the addresses by hand, they could have gotten it anyway). I found some instances where my address was still unencoded, so maybe that's how they got it, who knows.

I just did a search for my yahoo address (that I use for mailing lists), that's never been listed on my site. I can't see that it's generated even one spam after more than a year!