To mangle your publicly-posted email address sufficiently when you post it
publicly that spammers cannot harvest it for bulk mailing lists, yet not so
badly that legitimate senders cannot manually reconstruct it.
Munging is not for private emails. To mung there is both pointless and
rude. You use the munging techniques for posting your email address on the web,
in newsgroups or in blogs to slow down an avalanche of spam.
Why does my email address appear on my website only as an inconvenient non-clickable
image? e.g.
.
Because I have such a high Internet profile, without that munging technique, I
get thousands of spams a day. It is unfortunate to inconveniece my legitimate
correspondents with munging. The alternative is to discard legitimate
correspondence accidentally as spam.
Why You Should Mung Your Address
- Munging avoids junk email.
- Junk emailers harvest email addresses from Usenet newsgroup posts, both in the
headers and text body, anything that remotely looks like an email address.
- Munging is easy to do compared with other methods of avoiding spam.
- Munging lowers the percentage of good addresses harvested by the address thieves.
Why You Should Not Mung Your Address
Use of Invalid
If you want no mail at all from anyone, use an id that ends in invalid,
e.g. roedy@invalid. Don’t mention any domain
anywhere. This is the official way to do it. If your newsreader won’t let
you do that, then give it an address of the form xxx@invalid.invalid
or failing that xxx@invalid.com
If you are munging, you should put .invalid as the TLD
on the end to warn that the address is munged. e.g. roedy@notthemoonbutthe.com.invalid.
How To Mung
Examples of pointless munging, too easy to defeat by automation.
- george@nospam.aol.com.invalid
- georgeREMOVE.THIS@aol.com.invalid
- g e o r g e @ a o l d o t com.invalid
- georgeSPLIN@TERaol.com.invalid
You don’t want to irritate your legitimate readers by requiring too many
keystrokes to correct the address, e.g. g_e_o_r_g_e_@_a_o_l_d_o_t_com.invalid
take many keystrokes to correct, but is easy to correct via automation.
To mung, you must be creative and original. You have to defeat two classes of
demungers:
- algorithms that demung common patterns, willing to test several variant
demungings.
- ladies in their housecoats working from home willing to test several variant
demungings.
The trick to fooling (1) is to use a new pattern. The trick to fooling (2) is to
require specific knowledge an unskilled person would not have. e.g.
- roedy@HIGHKELVINmail.com.invalid. It still may go
sailing over the heads of people you want to decode it to hotmail.com.
- roedy@bluemindprod.com.no.invalid (leave out the
references to Norway)
- When you post any email address on the web in two parts separated by a graphic @
sign, with a deceptive alt tag. like this: dumbo
circus.com.
- Change your email address to a word not found in the dictionary or in Names
for Baby. Spammers will try sending to every possible word, given name
and surname on a given email host and remember what gets delivered for future
mailings. If you have a common name for your email address e.g. jimmy@hotmail.com,
even perfect munging to camouflage it won’t save you.
Unfortunately, if you leave hints about how to remove your mung, little ladies
in their housecoats working for $0.06 an hour in
China can read them just aswell.
On the other hand, if you are too subtle, your legitimate callers won’t
notice the mung, or won’t be able to correctly remove it on the first try.
The
Graphics Email Icon Approach :
⇐ png graphic icon, not text
I tell people to look on my website at the top of any page or more particularly
at http://mindprod.com/image/mailto/roedy.png.
The image gives my true email address, but it would be difficult for a machine
to read it, though a lady working in a housecoat for $0.06
an hour in China could. I used an odd font and made it slightly blurry to deter
OCR. You can generate similar graphics email icon with Masker.
SpamGourmet.com
SpamGourmet.com will
give you valid email address. However, all mail directed there is just thrown
away. This avoids the problem of bounced messages being generated. You will of
course lose legitimate mail as well from people who don’t know that
spamgourmet does this.
Alternative Approaches
You may find that many companies now are hiding their email addresses. To send
them email you must go to their website and send them a message by filling in a
form. They have had it up to the teeth with spam.
One approach is to change your public email address from time to time, and
discard the old one when it becomes too spam saturated. Keep a private one for
personal communication you never post.
Eventually some Mafioso is going get ticked by spam and take some spectacular
revenge which may discourage people entering the profession.
- mung FAQ
The techniques he recommends for munging I believe are far too easy to defeat by
automation. I base this opinion based this on my experience writing a legitimate
email address harvester and de-munger I use to send the location of the FAQs to
first time posters in comp.lang.java.help .
- spam
- I propose an email system based on digital ids and digitally signed documents.
See mailreader/newsreader
student project. If this were implemented spam as we know it would disappear.
The Internet currently provides a free lunch to spammers. We can hardly expect
good capitalists to do anything but leap into the feeding frenzy.
by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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