Archive for October 13th, 2008
Spam Prevention Tips #3
One of the most effective techniques spammers use to gather email addresses is to scan the Internet with programs called spiders (or bots). These spiders crawl the Internet looking for email addresses on web pages and online services. We all use Internet services on a regular basis and very often find that we’re required to sign up with an email address to gain access to a service we want to use. The problem is that some of these services then publicise our email addresses for others on the Internet to see. Why not give this a quick test; search for your email address in Google and If it turns up anywhere, then you can be pretty certain that spammers have already scanned that web site and retrieved your email address. Whether you’re a webmater that has your email address on your web site or in whois, or a normal web user with an account on facebook, myspace or linkedin, the chances of your email address being published somewhere is very high.
So what can you do about this? Well if you’re a webmaster you have a little bit more control than the normal web user as you’re able to make changes on your web sites. Some social networking sites are now employing techniques to protect their members’ email addresses, while others are dragging their heels to do so.Even if your social networking sservice doesn’t provide any protection technique, most do atleast allow you to set your email address as private so that only people you have accepted as friends can see it. You should be able to find this option in your account settings.
One of the methods being used more widely now is email address image conversion. This involves converting your email address into an image file such as a jpg or gif and uploading it to your web sites. The automated robots that spammers use to crawl the internet for addresses can’t read the text on image files very easily (at the moment) and this means that they won’t see your email address sites they crawl. Take a look at the following example,
The example above for the address you@yourdomain.com was generated by SafeMail which goes one step further, providing you with automatically generated links which allow you to paste the image code straight into your web page. The best thing about this technique is the simplicty of it. There are now several web sites available to do this automatically for you. We have suggested our favourite for you below.
SafeMail makes it very simple to convert your email address in seconds and then download the resultant image file. SafeMail carries a declaration that they will not abuse your email address.
Just to ensure that your email address will be safe with this serviceswe tested it with a specially created email address and monitored it for 2 weeks to see if it received any spam. After all, you’re giving your email address to these sites to convert it to an image, who is to say they won’t store it and send you spam? We didn’t receive any spam in the 2 week test and are pretty sure (at the time of writing) that your address will be safe with SafeMail. If this changes, we will let you know.
