How to hide your email address from spammers on Usenet:

Unfortunately spamming is one of the disadvantages of using the Internet and in particular the Newsgroups. If you post to the Newsgroups you will, sooner rather than later, be subjected to spam mail advertising anything from pyramid selling to pornography. There are, however, certain measures that you can take which can reduce the amount of spam mail you receive.

For example you may find that altering your email address is a simple but effective way of reducing incoming spam mail.

In Outlook Express, click on 'tools' then 'accounts' and select the 'news' tab at the top. Highlight your News account and click on 'properties'. You can change your email address here.

In Netscape, click on the 'Edit' menu and select 'Preferences'. Then click on the 'identity' tab under 'mail and newsgroups' and look at the 'email address' field. You will see that your e-mail address is there and this is what spammers use to e-mail you with.

Some people change this address, for example:

support@blueyonder.co.uk

to

support@NO.THANKS.blueyonder.co.uk

This means that spammers using this address will have any mails sent to you bounced back to them. However, this will also apply to legitimate users who are trying to e-mail you by clicking 'reply to sender'. One way to get around this is to notify them of the correct reply to address in your signature file, for example:

Technical Support
Telephone: 0800 953 2000
e-mail: support(at)blueyonder.co.uk
(Please remove the NO.THANKS. in the Reply-To address)

Please make sure that you change the domain part of your address, this prevents the spam from clogging up the mail server while it searches for the address. Also make sure that the munged domain you have added isn't a valid domain. Otherwise you risk forcing your spam on an innocent bystander...

Be creative with your mung, and change it often as well. These steps will prevent harvesters from picking up on patterns, and possibly changing their software to defeat them.

Make it obvious to humans.

• DO: yourname(AT)example(DOT)com
• DO: yournamZ@ZxamplZ.nZt (Replace Z with E)
• DO: see_my_sig@for.my.real.address
  
• DON'T: yourname@foo.example.com

If you decide to add a "spamblock" to your existing address, put it on the right-hand side of the @ sign. This avoids making your provider's email server handle undeliverable mail.

• DO: yourname@-REMOVE_THIS-example.com
  
• DON'T: yourname-SPAMBLOCK-@example.com

Tell folks how to de-mung your address somewhere in your message. The signature (sig) that gets added to the end of each message is a good place to do this.

• DO: "To reply via email, remove '-REMOVE-THIS-' from my address."
• DO: "Real address is myrealname AT example DOT com"
• DO: "Replace all the Z's with E's to reply"

NOTE: DO NOT put a directly usable address in your sig, because many harvesters collect everything with an @ sign in it.

• DO: "Send email to myrealname; ISP is example DOT com"
  
• DON'T: "Real address is myrealname@example.com"

For more advice and tips it might be worth paying a visit to the following newsgroups dedicated to Internet abuse:

• news.admin.net-abuse.*

and in particular

• news.admin.net-abuse.email

You may also find the following pages of use:

• http://help.blueyonder.co.uk/html/abuse/howavoid.shtml
• http://shared.blueyonder.co.uk/terms.html
• http://abuse.blueyonder.co.uk

There are programs that you can download that monitor your access and limit certain types of material from getting through, try:

• http://www.cyberpatrol.com
• http://www.netnanny.com

you can also download Cyber patrol from the blueyonder homepages at http://help.blueyonder.co.uk

Some mail clients allow you to set up filters, Outlook has this facility and will block any messages containing chosen keywords.

There are also plenty of online spam trackers that will dissect the spam mail and send abuse reports to the relevant ISPs. One of these is Spamcop, at http://spamcop.net

This is not a service supplied by blueyonder, but can be extremely useful for tracking the source of these messages.

[FAQ maintained by Matt Bloor of blueyonder Technical Support.]

Additions by byUsers

Don't reply to a SPAM email. It only confirms your email address. Better to throw the message away than rise to the bait.

Report SPAM to the source ISP if possible. Just one advert about holidays reported to MSN Hotmail got the account cancelled in less than 30 minutes.

For balance, the address-munging FAQ should be read in conjunction with the Anti-address-munging FAQ:

• http://members.aol.com/emailfaq/mungfaq.html
• http://www.interhack.net/pubs/munging-harmful/

Last Amended : 2003-10-19 by elfin
Original Author : Matt Bloor